[UPDATE] Wicker Park Struggles To Keep Christmas-Themed Douche Hordes Away
By Melissa McEwen in Food on Oct 3, 2014 9:30PM
[UPDATE, 6:30 p.m. The Fifty/50, one of the businesses listed by the Chicago Christmas Crawl as a participant, says on their facebook page they never agreed to participate:
Despite what you see on the Chicago Christmas Crawl website, The Fifty/50 will not participate in the Chicago Christmas Crawl event. We told the event organizer we would not participate -- yet they still listed our business as a participant.To reiterate, The Fifty/50 was never going to participate in the Chicago Christmas Crawl and will not participate in the Chicago Christmas Crawl.]
In August in the year 410, the Visigoth barbarians sacked the city of Rome. Since the 1990s, a similar barbarian tribe known as the Douches has sacked the city of Chicago in an event known ominously as TBOX, disguised as lovable elves and Santas, who unlike these barbarian douches, would never ever stab people with a beer bottle. Efforts to repel the barbarians, sometimes euphemistically called "bar crawls," have so far been unsuccessful and unfortunately they are spreading to new neighborhoods. The next neighborhood victim is Wicker Park, site of the planned "Chicago Christmas Crawl."
After a community Facebook group erupted in anger at the bar crawl, Ald. Proco "Joe" Moreno (1st) vowed to protect the neighborhood posting "After hearing concerns from the community, I'm going to work to shut down the Chicago Christmas Crawl. I never gave my full support for the event, and if the local residents, business owners, local neighborhood associations, and police don't want it, I will do everything in my power to keep it from happening."
Since then, Chicago Christmas Crawl organizer Jess Loren, a veteran of TBOX, has been on a PR tour of sorts at community meetings, pretending to care despite the fact that she's said she's already planning on going through with the event because no regulations are in place to stop her. Which is kind of alarming, since TBOX made similar promises to "play nice," which resulted in a drunken stabbing and mountains of litter and vomit. Sadly, no one listened to Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) when he called to regulate bar crawls, because they didn't believe they would become an issue in other neighborhoods.
You might remember bar crawls fondly from your college years, but these are bar crawls in name only. In reality they are commercial events aimed at generating money for the organizers and leaving neighborhoods with the wreckage.
It's mysterious why restaurants like Takito and Folklore have decided to participate since they manage to draw crowds with their good food and drinks without resorting to gimmicks like this. The only upside here is the outrage generated will hopefully result in regulations being passed that will enable neighborhoods to expel these kind of events more effectively.