Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade & River Dyeing

About This Event

Two events, one morning: the Chicago River turns green first, then a parade steps off a couple hours later down Columbus Drive — one of the single biggest downtown crowds of the whole year, and both halves are completely free to watch.

The dye trick started as an accident. In 1961, Stephen Bailey — business manager of the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers union, and a childhood friend of Mayor Richard J. Daley — noticed a plumber's white overalls stained bright green from a dye normally used to trace leaky pipes. The next year, the plumbers union dumped 100 pounds of it into the river for St. Patrick's Day, and it stayed green for a week. Daley, who wanted to centralize the city's scattered St. Patrick's Day celebrations into one downtown event, backed it as the parade's signature moment. The dye has since gone vegetable-based for the environment — and, oddly enough, it's actually orange as a powder; it only turns green once it hits the water.

Worth knowing: the city hasn't formally confirmed the 2027 date as of this writing — the parade reliably lands on the Saturday closest to March 17, which points to March 13, 2027, the estimate on the card above, but treat it as a strong pattern-based guess, not a locked date, until the city's own parade page confirms it. Claim a curb spot early either way; this isn't a stroll-up-at-noon kind of crowd.