For the first time ever, the St. Patrick’s Day parade will march past the president’s home Friday when marchers take their traditional route up Fifth Avenue.
The parade, which kicked off at 11 a.m. on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 44th Street, will make its way past “White House North” — Trump Tower — with its heavy security presence, organizers said.
This year, police will not allow cars to cross the Fifth Avenue route, which continues north to 79th Street, said Pat Smith, a spokesman for parade organizers.
“So this year, you won’t have those two or three stops during the parade,” Smith said, adding the new measure will make the entire celebration “a little livelier this year.”
Dozens of blocks surrounding the parade route will be blocked to traffic for set up and dispersal, including 43rd Street between Vanderbilt and Sixth avenues, south of the parade, and blocks as far uptown as the mid-80s, according to the NYPD.
A visible police presence will be in place by the blocks surrounding Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th streets, a detail that has been a fixture for the past few months.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Enda Kenny, the Irish taoiseach, or prime minister, are all expected to march.
De Blasio, who had boycotted the celebration when it used to ban openly gay Irish groups, marched last year.
Smith said 100,000 marchers and 2 million spectators are expected for Friday’s parade, on a day that the National Weather Service forecasts to be 39 degrees and sunny, a far cry from the slush storm that hit the city earlier in the week.
He said sanitation crews have been hard at work all week clearing the snow and ice on the route and surrounding side streets.
“The Sanitation Department seems to be really on top of cleaning the streets and corners,” he said.
Michael Dowling, the CEO of the Northwell Health System and this year’s grand marshal, said he hopes the parade will remind people that the country is “an incubator of opportunity.”
“We are all immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants, and you cannot write the history of the United States, or write the history of New York, without writing the history of immigration,” Dowling said at a pre-parade event last month.
