[EVG reader photo from Thursday]
As we first noted on Thursday, someone placed flyers around the neighborhood noting that SantaCon, scheduled for today, has been cancelled... which means, according to the sign:
• NO congregating in Santa costumes
• NO throwing up on the sides of buildings
• NO public sex acts
• NO excessive drunkenness
A member of NYCR, the group who posted the flyers, told Gothamist yesterday that they reached out to SantaCon organizers to call off the event.
"Our country feels so divided right now that we are all searching for things that unify us," their spokesperson said. "The one thing that I have found that we all have in common is our disdain for SantaCon. Over the past few years myself and others have witnessed several horrible acts ..."
"We have reached out to organizers and asked them to cancel but have not heard back," they continued. "We hope they will come to their senses. We hope the organizers hear us loud and clear and are aware that we will be out in force tomorrow to stop SantaCon if they don't cancel."
They add that anyone interested in spending their Saturday aiding their crusade should meet up at noon Saturday at Bar 13. "We want to make it clear to the young people out there that this is not just a bunch of 40 and 50 year olds and we have several people under the age of 35 planning on participating."
Other media outlets reported on the story as well.
Gary Egan, general manager of Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place told CBS 2 that he would be cool with seeing SantaCon go.
“I really wish it would be canceled,” Egan said. “It’s turned into an abomination of drunk Santa Clauses fighting; vomiting all over the city. and it sends a terrible message to children.”
CBS 2 also talked with one SantaCon fan.
“SantaCon canceled – what? What?” said Zavier Dahlbenza of East New York, Brooklyn. “The drunkenness, the Santa costumes — I love all of it! I don’t think it should be canceled at all. I think it should keep going.”
There is also a Boycott SantaCon Twitter account (not sure if this is affiliated with the group who created the posters. This account started in 2014.)
SantaCon is an alt-right convention with red hats instead of white. Dial 311 and report people to the naughty list.
— Boycott SantaCon (@boycottsantacon) December 9, 2016
Anyway, SantaCon organizers had to reassure people that the Con was still on...
@NYCdisinterest Don't believe everything you read on poles! (unless its the North Pole).. #santaconnyc is definitely on!
— Santacon NYC (@santacon) December 9, 2016
SantaCon starts today at 10. At least 18 bars are participating in the East Village.
Lastly, a word from the 9th Precinct...
Extra officers are working tomorrow for @santacon to ensure everyone a good & safe time while being respectful of our neighbors pic.twitter.com/d7LGqg1OUn
— NYPD 9th Precinct (@NYPD9Pct) December 9, 2016
Year in and year out, the East Village gets the short straw. Next year seriously... spread the $'and vomit across the five boroughs and give the EV a well deserved break from the Con. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI m older than the Santa Con crowd and of course I think it is a terrible abuse of younger adults gullibility and desire to be part of something bigger than themselves. I sure as hell wish all that energy was put to something less destructive, and didn't involve the abuse of alcohol. This generation unlike my late baby boomer has a strong desire to do everything en masse or in group of at least 6-8. My generation was (is) more about being an individual.
ReplyDeleteThese kids were raised in a more corporate culture of working in groups, not standing out which is why a lemming event such as Santa Con is such a perfect fit. Unless someone in government put a stop to this the constant influx of the lemming gen will insure its survival.
I imagine bars dont even make much off the conners.. this type of brood slugs vodka on the train in or in their 400 sq ft share, goes into these bars sloshed already on a foreign load and stand around and sip bud lights. Wankers. Sorry folks that have shifts today. Moreover good businesses can even suffer. Thought it would be a nice night for a special occasion local resto... prob just stay in now : /
ReplyDeleteWanna be a Santa? Bring extra gloves, coats, socks, beanies, scarves or blankets to Maryhouse at 55 East 3rd Street or St. Joseph House at 36 East 1st Street. We will give them out to the homeless.
ReplyDeleteIgnore those Signs and Proudly come out to show your Douchebag Talents and Vomiting ability!
ReplyDeleteHappy Sad-a-Con Day! With wind chills in the low 20s, good luck trying not to freeze your asses off today. To all the Sad looking Santas out there, I'll be sipping hot chocolate while you make frozen asses out of yourselves. This event may have been interesting when it first started, but now its just a sad way for alcoholics to get drunk, and for bars and pickpockets to take your money. Christmas is Merry, but what you are doing today is just a sad way to spend a day, marching through the streets with loud, drunk strangers in bizarre outfits like the sad fools you have grown up to be. I'm sure this is not how your first grade teacher imagined you would turn out to be. You are making nobody proud of you, except perhaps for all the strangers on your social media timelines giving you likes while they laugh at your sad asses too. So happy Sad-a-Con, the day that reminds us all how sad it is that so many people are so easy to con. Just like our elections.
ReplyDelete@8:34
ReplyDeleteThank you for all those wild generalizations, dont forget to remind readers about that "culture of working in groups" in the next comment section that labels millennials "selfish," "spoiled" and "unwilling to be part of a community"
When will the older readers of this blog, especially one who considers his or herself to be such an "individual," stop boiling millions of young people down to whatever nasty description fits whatever lame argument being made?
I hate Santacon as much as the next person, but, as we should have learned from Trump supporters, antagonizing participants only entrenches them further.
Yes, today the neighborhood will be a little bit of a mess, so use it as an opportunity to explore a new part of this great city! There's no need to treat this like an apocalyptic event.
@10:03am: "antagonizing participants only entrenches them further." Nah, not really, b/c the participants change from year to year, and are too drunk to care about anything other than staying drunk.
ReplyDeleteThe truly entrenched parties are the "organizers" who are laughing their asses off all the way to the bank, and laughing at us b/c they have the unfettered ability to fuck over this neighborhood with the tacit approval of NYC, with the authorities basically agreeing to look the other way. They're laughing at us b/c THEY get to decide that WE are ALL GOING TO HAVE A SHITTY DAY ONCE A YEAR so that they can make money. Now THAT is power!
Non-drunk residents of this area mean exactly ZERO to the people who run Santacon - we are just one more group of nobodies they are fucking over, which is what they do in life.
Christmas is dead. People like these are responsible. Morality, out the window.
ReplyDeleteIf we all went out (dressed as EVers), sat in the bars (ordering club soda "sorry: designated driver"), taking up space, quietly reading EVGrieve... we could kill it!!
ReplyDelete@Adfus
ReplyDeleteIf I am wrong in my "wild generalizations" than please explain why so many from this generation will lower there self esteem to participate in such a horrid event. One which give money to bar owners and leaves a path of destruction in each neighborhood it invades?
To compare Trump supporters who in most part are people which believed they had little or no future in this country to these young adults who are certainly college educated, living in or near a rich city with employment and indulged in apex of consumerism is a stretch.
Antagonizing Trump and his supporters should be encouraged, standing up to bullies is how you stop them. I am wary of the lemming like mentality of people that participate in Santa Con but not enough to keep my mouth shut.
@11:17am: Yes, we could kill it that way, but I'm not in the habit of spending my Saturday sitting in bars. I actually have a life and stuff that I have to do, much of which can't be done today in this area. Spouse just returned from St. Nicholas cookie walk and said the streets were already jammed with packs of fake Santas, all doing the only thing they are good at: bar crawling.
ReplyDeleteImagine if even half these people spent half the day actually volunteering to do something useful (helping out in soup kitchens, holiday toy drives, delivering warm clothing to places like Mary House) - but no, they're too selfish for that. Life is only about them and their selfies/instagram accounts.
I'd just like the home addresses of some of these fuckers, so I could go dump garbage on their parents' front lawns and see how well that goes over.
Our politicians allow it. They leave us spread-eagle for all and any to do with the EV as they will. This will never change as long as we do not put pressure on our elected officials to stop Santacon, the abomination of Astor Plaza and all other attacks on our community. So when you blog this site, send a copy to Mendez, Glick, Hoylman. It might make them realize they don't work for the party... they work for the voters who elected them!
ReplyDeleteI find it really stupid to blame this on Millennials (and spare us the pontificating about "corporate culture," tons of these young people can't even get jobs and I thought they were all cool kids creating apps from their laptops at the coffeehouse? pls try to keep your stereotypes straight).
ReplyDeleteThe Santacon crowd may have many participants in that age group, but it is run and supported by by a bunch of Gen X alcoholics, and I wouldn't blame THAT generation for it either, because if your exalted Boomer alcoholic idiots were still alive and/or capable of hauling ass around the city drunk all day, they'd be doing it too. The idea that Boomers are a bunch of lone wolves is so ridiculous as to be laughable; I mean what the fuck was Woodstock then?
Santacon is about a TYPE of person—feeble-minded, uncreative, easily swayed by peer groups, and prone to acts of mind-erasement—and sadly that person exits in every generation, and probably always will.
@12:38pm: No, Santacon is about people with a drinking problem, people who likely need to go to an AA meeting or a few hundred AA meetings. It's about people who cannot imagine a better way to spend their time than being drunk and disgusting in public on a Saturday, starting at 10am. I do agree that the participants are the sort of "whatever" people who are very easily swayed.
ReplyDeleteDon't blame the boomers at all - I am one myself, and you wouldn't have gotten me to Woodstock on a bet. Plus, Woodstock was a one-time event, not an annual drunk-fest like Santacon. But if you want to go back in time far enough, maybe you can pin this on the guys who lived in Bowery flophouses.
I *do* blame today's frat-douche/sorostitute culture (and please note that boomers wouldn't have been caught dead belonging to one in NYC) for glorifying drinking as a hobby, an avocation, a way to fill dead time. And this group has nothing but dead time, and dead space between their ears.
@12:38
ReplyDeleteI don't believe a whole generation such as the boomers could be boiled down to 3 days of peace and music as you suggest. Boomers marched on DC to protest the Vietnam War, civil rights and in the 70's women's and gay rights. I doubt they were drunk when doing so. I bet a vast majority of the Santa Con folks as children never left the house unless it was a pre-arranged meeting called a "play date". Facebook and such have extended this form of socializing into their early adulthood. Check out the non costumed packs of 12 millennials out on weekend nights to prove my point. When I went through school we produced papers and work sitting from our own desk not from a large group table. There was a major shit in eduction techniques with that generation as in preparation to work in teams which is the most important skill needed when entering the corporate work force. Lemmings just follow and create nothing, easy to profit from and the Santa Con organizers know this.
I just sincerely hope I'm never referred to as "Spouse."
ReplyDeleteAs a "millennial" (a word I only use to describe myself to express my age and nothing more) I don't disagree with the things people are saying in full, but some stuff is a bit of stretch. Out of my friends, there is a large amount who dislike Santacon, especially as they get older. Others do like it. I have attended one once when I was younger, wearing only a hat as opposed to the full outfit, and it is really not my thing. I was going with some friends who were into that scene.
ReplyDeleteI don't enjoy large agro crowds of drunk people, but I had more of a tolerance for it when I was a bit younger and wanted to try and have fun. Millennials as a term is now starting to include people closing in on 30 or even early 30s depending on what definition you use (time flies I guess) so the term which is already stupid will become more and more dated as the college-aged crowd who were middle schoolers when I was in college becomes the norm.
I resent the notion of baby boomers being special. Identifying with a generation is silly. If you are a post-WWII American then you are a probably a very lucky individual who either made something of their luck or squandered it on partying regardless of what decade you were born (I don't want to write off people in this country who have had no such luck but I feel like the audience of this blog all probably is at least comfortable and leading a first world existence).
However, squandering your life partying is different then partying when you are young. While drinking from morning to night in rowdy crowds is not a great way to drink alcohol, it's a bit disingenuous to say that this is a symptom of the current generation or assume the people who do it are destined for a life addicted to the bottle. Sometimes, people drink recklessly when they are young on occasion. I really, seriously, doubt this trend started in 2006 or whenever that magical millennial cutoff begins in your mind.
However I also get that there is a culture war between people who see the EV as a neighborhood and people who see this as a bar destination. I am sympathetic because my parents dealt with the same thing when I was younger (we lived in a gentrifying neighborhood area of another large city that also has a loud bar scene in parts).
I also don't exactly know how the police could ban people from dressing in costume and going to bars without overreach.
I don't generally like the Santacon crowd because they for the most part represent people I cannot relate to at all. But I don't know what the answer is and the one day a year does not bother me, really. I don't quite understand the generational posturing because that seems silly, baby boomers in the eyes of many millennials are the ones who kicked off the trend of telling your parents to shut up and going to a party. Forrest Gump for example is a good movie that shows the disconnect between boomers who were socially conscious and those who really just saw various movements as bandwagons to jump on for the purposes of drug abuse and partying.
Prior to boomers, you had people who had witness the shift from the old modern world to the new modern world and had seen world war(s) and who seem like the last generation of "old" people to some degree no matter how old the boomers and gen-xers I know become. I'm not saying this to insult boomers, but out of genuine confusion as to why so many boomers on here hate millennials. Boomers, gen-x and millennials are all cut from the same cloth and I'm sure the 20-something year old assholes you hate today are just echoes of the 20-something year-old assholes you hated 40 years ago. A lot of people are just dicks but there's no reason to get fed up with an entire generation over it.
But if it makes you feel better, despite being uncomfortable about legislating barhopping due to my personal liberty beliefs, I think most Santacon attendees are dicks and I know a lot of my peers feel similarly, so if you are honestly worried all is lost with us, you shouldn't be.
Um, obviously there still a lot of people, millennials even!, who take political stands, so it's not even worth responding to the 60s protests comments.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that Santacon is a juvenile way of socializing, obviously, but please, try to remember that you were a young "lemming" at some point, too. Maybe you were club-hopping in the 80s, or dressing like a Seattle punk in the 90s, or hitchhiking to Woodstock in the 60s. I can guarantee that people older than yourself used the very same language you are using now.
Finally, there's a difference between calmly explaining to someone why he or she is wrong/inconsiderate and resorting to name-calling (antagonizing). You can stand up to bullies or to Santacon, but if you do so with some empathy, you're much more likely to get the result you want.
What's with the "let's show them we're not just a bunch of 40 and 50 year olds crap"?
ReplyDeleteI am over 39 and could give a !@#$ if people think I'm some old, crotchety man. I'm not old or crotchety, I just think it's dumb, intrusive, violent, lawbreaking shi t and sorry, I was all over the East Village before SC and no one acted like these people did, sorry. Holiday revelry, sure, but not vomiting, fighting, screaming etc.
First off how do they get away with basically an organized march without a permit? Second in the end the REAL PROBLEM with SantaCon are all the fuc khead bars and other alcohol serving establishments like Continental who serve these pests.
I just passed many Hundreds of Drunk, Obnoxious Loooosers all looking Like Santa Clause. Enuff Said.
ReplyDeleteAn organized march? What SantaCon are you looking at?
ReplyDelete@Samuel: The difference is RESPECT - self-respect and respect for others.
ReplyDeleteHow do you think a random town in NJ would like it if it were announced as the place where all the Santacon revelers should assemble for their bar crawl? Do you want that crowd at your home, or outside your family's home, groups of people screaming drunk & getting into fights until 4am? The behavior of Santacon participants is of ZERO self-respect AND ZERO respect for those of us who LIVE in this community.
IMO, people who participate in Santacon do it b/c they need to be sheep in a herd to get away with the lousy behavior they demonstrate. If they did it alone, they'd get busted by the cops or else someone would just bust them in the head.
I assure you that, as a card-carrying boomer, I did NOT spend my youth getting drunk/high, and when I moved into the E. Village I had RESPECT for my neighbors who were much older than me and had a right to live in peace.
Maybe I'm an outlier b/c I put myself through college with scholarships + student loans + a lot of shitty jobs. I didn't have the time or the $$ to be a fratty douche - and if I *had* behaved that way, my friends would have given me the heave-ho. We had fun, yes, and people drank *sometimes* - but we didn't make the holiday season an excuse for literally thousands of people to walk around all day & night with the sole aim of getting stupid-drunk.
IMO, Santacon participants are being used, just like Trump voters were used by Trump. If people want to dress up & get drunk, why don't they do it near their own homes? Oh, b/c the neighbors will know who they are and they will be called on it. So they come into MY territory - OUR territory - and shit all over it with the idea that *someone* said it was OK to do that. Well, the Santacon "organizers" are shitheads, and everyone who participated is just playing follow-the-shithead's advice. You all got played by "Santacon" - and I hope everyone who overindulged pays for it painfully ALL DAY on Sunday and maybe into next week as well.
I have lived in the East Village for 30 years. Yesterday, for the first time, I put on a Santa cap and went out for SantaCon. I had the greatest time! I thought I'd probably have an OK time, but it was fantastic. These young people were great. Before people complain about something they know nothing about, they should try to participate.
ReplyDeleteThat's so cool you did that! Why did you decide to go this year? And you only wore a Santa cap and not a whole suit? What did you think of SantaCon in previous years? Did you go by yourself? What was your favorite bar? What was the longest line you waited in for entry? Did you get drunk? Did you make a donation to charity? What was it about "these young people" that you found so great?
DeleteSpecific details always make for better stories.