Dozens of event passes are pinned onto the bulletin board in Director of Special Events Ann Chance’s fourth-floor office at City Hall. It’s organized chaos. Her awards from years of planning events for the city compete for space on her full bookshelf. Soon, it will all be packed into boxes.
After decades of planning parties and parades—almost 13 of those years spent at City Hall—Chance’s last day was June 28. During her time with the city, she coordinated the 2009 MLB All-Star Game and the 2011 World Series Championship Parade through her office. She worked annually with Fair, Pride, and Mardi Gras organizers, and planned our Veteran’s Day parades. Not to mention all the smaller neighborhood functions she helped organizers get permits for. Added together, she coordinated hundreds of events per year through the Office of Special Events, which she created at the request of Mayor Slay in 2007. Her last event, though, was her biggest: The Stanley Cup Parade and Rally.
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“As the city became more successful, and we had more and more events, it became pretty apparent that we needed to have this office to keep law and order,” Chance says. Before, organizers would have to apply separately to the various departments for permits and licenses, and the departments didn’t communicate about it with one another. Now, Chance’s special events office is almost “a one-stop shop.”
“It’s much easier for someone because they get one answer back: Yes, your event has been approved,” Chance says.
Chance came to the city from the Downtown STL organization, then known as the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis. Before that, she was a long-time volunteer at Mardi Gras in Soulard. During her 10 years as the chairman of Mardi Gras, she was the driving force who nurtured it to what it is today: The second-largest Mardi Gras in the country after New Orleans.
Chance loves that it showcases the businesses in her own backyard. After their kids were grown, Chance and her husband moved to Soulard. They loved the music and fun, and they wanted to be in the city.
“I never run out of something to do,” Chance says of her neighborhood.
Chance’s swan song was the city’s long-awaited—though quickly planned—Stanley Cup Victory Parade and Rally. She coordinated the vending, safety presence, clean-up, sound, parade logistics, and more for the celebration, which drew an estimated 500,000 Blues fans to the Arch grounds and surrounding streets. Her office started planning in hushed whispers when the Blues made the finals.
“We’d say, ‘Well you know, if we win, there could be this thing that goes on,’” Chance says. “We never talked about it publicly, we’d never say the word, but it all had to get done.”
Thankfully, Chance and the city had practice. She had a hand in planning two World Series parades in 2006 and 2011, a Super Bowl parade in 2000, the MLB All-Star Game in 2009, and the NCAA Final Four game in 2005. (You know, because we are a sports city.)
“The wonderful thing about planning for me is the fact that we have such a wonderful city,” she says. “I, with confidence, can go to work and do this knowing that the people that come are going to have a good time, and they’re not going to destroy our city.”
After a career full of special events, Chance is looking forward to spending time with the faces in the photos that decorate her office: her husband and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
“When I came to work here, I was 65,” Chance says. “I was ready to retire then. And now here I am, 78, and I’m really ready to retire. Although I love what I do. I have not a minute’s regret about any of it.”
