Well, consider the source

Rico says that St. Patrick's Day is traditionally one of excessive drinking and riotous behavior, but Hoboken takes it a New Jersey bit farther, according to Joseph Goldstein and Nate Schwerber's article in The New York Times:

With its mile-long stretch of boutiques, restaurants, and bars, this waterfront city long ago left its roots as a shipping and industrial center, finding new life as young professionals set up homes here, and hordes of younger folks arrive each weekend to drink.
There have been growing pains. Rent creeps toward Manhattan levels, and the nightlife scene can certainly get out of hand, especially around the city’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, an event that has spawned so much rowdiness that the mayor is threatening to cancel it.
Those who favor banning the parade gained more ammunition after the festivities this year which, by all accounts, got astonishingly out of hand soon after the parade ended on Saturday afternoon.
Indeed, the level of excess is only now coming into focus; the city’s police chief and the mayor held a news conference to announce some of the grim statistics: there were 34 arrests, up from 25 in 2010. Two women told the authorities that they were sexually assaulted over the weekend. Officials at Hoboken’s main hospital said they admitted 166 people on Saturday, the highest such one-day total at the hospital.
Firefighters responding to a backyard blaze were greeted by revelers on a balcony who spat down and also poured beer at them. Then someone threw a flower planter down, the fire chief, Richard Blohm, said.
A sampling of police reports presents a picture of a lawless afternoon, with drunken young men on the prowl. A nineteen-year-old wielding a knife menaced three people. A man kicked a woman he hardly knew after her fiancé told him off. Someone wearing green boxer shorts and no pants broke the spindles off a banister and urinated in a stairwell.
Looking to next year, Mayor Dawn Zimmer said she planned to move the 2012 parade away from the weekend, to a Wednesday, to “reduce the amount of partying that occurs.”
At the news conference, Ms. Zimmer sounded exasperated as she said that she hoped the festivities next year would be quieter, more in line with the atmosphere of the city’s Memorial Day Parade. If “the out-of-control atmosphere” persists, Ms. Zimmer said, she will consider canceling the event.
Each year, the parade divides the people of Hoboken, a city of about 50,000, into two camps: those who love the day, and those who fear it.
Eileen Martinez, who works behind the counter at Sparrow Wine and Liquor along the city’s main street, left town on Saturday with her children, as she does every year. “I took my daughters to Edgewater, to the mall, and spent all day, just to kill time,” Ms. Martinez, 35, said. But even her 8 a.m. departure did not spare her “a preview of what’s going on”. She said she saw “people stumbling” through the streets and forming lines outside bars.
By contrast, Nicole Magana, 33, said she kicked off a fifteen-hour spree on Saturday by taking a beer with her into the shower. Around 9 a.m., she arrived to a “kegs and eggs” themed party, which she left for a different “beer and bagels” event nearby.
On Tuesday, Ms. Magana, a real estate broker, was still carrying in her purse a color-coded itinerary she had drawn up of all the house parties she had planned to visit that day. Over the course of the festivities, she heard about a friend who was given a ticket for the unlikely offense of throwing meatballs out of a window.
Pointing to the fact that Hoboken had become a destination in its own right, Ms. Magana attributed the hooliganism to what she called the “bridge-and-tunnel crowd, people who come here from out of town.”
It was not as if the city didn't see this coming. With a history of problems surrounding recent St. Patrick’s Day parades, city leaders warned that they would have a zero-tolerance policy against drunken and disorderly conduct, establishing up to $2,000 in fines for alcohol-related infractions.
Yet, as always, most of the city’s bars opened at 9 a.m. on Saturday, and were filled by 11, two hours before the parade began. Large crowds began to cram into numerous house parties, which the city’s police chief characterized in a letter to residents as the “largest problem on the parade day”.
By 3 p.m., the parade— a peaceful, family-friendly event— was over, and the problems would begin in earnest. Of the 166 visits to the city’s main hospital, Hoboken University Medical Center, about a quarter were for excessive intoxication, said the nurse manager of the emergency room, Bart Meehan. Fifteen patients had lacerations and nine had head injuries, and there were a number of victims of falls. The hospital recorded nine assault victims. Mr. Meehan said the hospital was well prepared, because, based on past experience, it had planned for a disaster.
Mayor Zimmer did note that the number of overall citations for minor infractions, like public urination and public intoxication, was down to 296 this year from 555 last year, but she said it was no consolation given the seriousness of the remaining crimes. “Over all, the numbers were down,” she said, “but I can’t separate that from the fact that there were sexual assaults and flower plants thrown on my firemen.”
Details about the reported sexual assaults were scant. In one instance, a woman did not want to proceed with an investigation although she “was alleging a sexual impropriety took place,” a prosecutor, Debra Simon, said in an interview. In the second case, a woman in her early twenties told investigators she was raped on Saturday afternoon, Ms. Simon said. “They should just cancel St. Patrick’s Day,” said Ms. Simon, the deputy first assistant of the Hudson County prosecutor’s office.
But there is still strong sentiment in favor of the event. “Who doesn’t like a parade?” Phyllis Smith, a real estate broker, said from her office on Washington Street, the main street where the parade route runs. “I love a parade. It was a beautiful parade, just young kids having fun,” said Ms. Smith, who has a relative on the parade committee.
The parade’s organizers, the Hoboken St. Patrick’s Parade Committee, did not return calls or emails for comment. If the parade were scrapped, it would have significant financial repercussions for some of the city’s businesses, not just the bars.
“We love it; this is our Christmas,” said Rose Kirchgessner, 61, who runs a souvenir shop on Washington Street with her husband. “Never mind Santa Claus; it’s the leprechauns that they like.”
Other merchants were less enthusiastic. Owen Miller, who works at Tunes, a record store, said he had to handle crowd control for the barrage of people coming into the store in search of a bathroom. One reveler stumbled in, knocked down a display of pins on the counter and asked Mr. Miller if he would like to fight. When Mr. Miller, 20, replied that he would not, the man asked him why not, Mr. Miller recounted. “I said, ‘Because I’m working,’” Mr. Miller said. “He just shook his head and kept saying, ‘That’s so weird.’”