Chicago Pride Parade

About This Event

Chicago's Pride Parade is the city's single largest one-day event, period — over a million people lining a route through Lakeview and Boystown (officially Northalsted), floats and contingents stretching for hours, free to watch, with the whole neighborhood turning into one long street party whether or not you ever actually see a float go by.

It started as something much smaller and much riskier. On June 27, 1970 — one year after the Stonewall uprising — about 100 to 150 people gathered at Washington Square Park and marched to what's now Daley Center. It was the first Gay Liberation march in the country, a full day ahead of similar marches in New York and San Francisco that same weekend. From that handful of people, it's grown into a parade that now draws more than a million spectators a year — and by calendar coincidence, June 27 is also the exact date the 2027 parade lands on, 57 years to the day after that first march.

Worth knowing if you're going: the route runs through Lakeview/Northalsted, and good curb spots along Halsted and Broadway fill in well before the 11 AM start — this is a come-early, not a show-up-at-eleven kind of event, and the surrounding blocks close to traffic for most of the day.