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Cubs Win! And Wrigleyville Celebration Was Huge But Behaved (PHOTOS)

By  Joe Ward and Ariel Cheung | October 7, 2015 6:52pm | Updated on October 8, 2015 8:50am

 The Cubs are moving on! And Wrigleyville celebrated — responsibly, for the most part.
Wrigleyville erupts as Cubs advance in playoffs
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WRIGLEYVILLE — The Cubs are moving on!

And Wrigleyville celebrated — responsibly, for the most part.

The Cubs, in the one-game playoff, mowed down the Pittsburgh Pirates 4-0 Wednesday night. Jake Arrieta pitched a complete game, stole a base and was in the middle of a bench-clearing showdown after getting hit with a pitch.

After it was over, fans in Wrigleyville bars flooded the streets. Clark Street near Addison was packed with ecstatic fans. They swarmed outside Wrigley Field, bathed in blue lights of police cars. (Scroll down for our full Storify of tweets and photos from Wednesday night.)

They jumped on top of each other and on cars. They poured beer and screamed. The Cubs are moving on in the playoffs.

The Cubs now play the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Division Series, which begins Friday in St. Louis. The team returns to Wrigley Field Monday.

RELATED: Hot Tip, NLDS Tickets Are Cheaper in St. Louis

Wrigleyville bars were jam packed Wednesday night, as Cubs fans joined with Blackhawks fans celebrating the first game of their season.

About half an hour before the first pitch, bars in Wrigleyville were already packed with lines out the door onto Clark Street, and vendors hawking Chicago sports gear were out in full force. The word on Clark Street was that bars were strictly sticking to their occupancy limits, keeping the scene inside bars relatively mild while lines remained outside.

Barricades went up on Clark Street around 9:30 p.m. and mounted Chicago Police officers arrived around the bottom of the 8th inning. While fans filled the streets right after the Cubs win, police officers contained the partying to mostly south of Addison on Clark Street, and partiers largely dispersed within about an hour after the game ended.

RELATED: A Fair-Weather Fan's Guide to the Chicago Cubs' 2015 Season

As the crowd thinned out, a handful of reports of violence came from nearby areas — a fight at a gas station, a man hit in the head with a bottle, an attempted break-in — though Chicago Police did not confirm the incidents late Wednesday night.

Despite getting to Wrigleyville in time to watch the Cubs Wild Card playoff game from the comfort of a Clark Street bar, unlike thousands of fans who waited in long lines outside, Mandy Welster and her friends left Slugger's, 3540 N. Clark St. to watch the final innings from the sidewalk.

The Cubs had a sizable lead, Welster said, and so they wanted to be out on Clark Street before everyone else.

"We were confident enough that they were going to win," said Welster, who drove from Northwest Indiana with her husband and friends and watched the last few innings through the windows so they could be part of the first wave of fans to storm Clark.

"We wanted to be at the party. This is about the Cubbies going to the World Series!"

One person outside of The Stretch, 3485 N. Clark St., said his party had been waiting in line for nearly an hour, and that they were too sober for the type of revelry that would be taking place in the street. When asked what they'll do when everyone inside the bar files out, the man said "then we'll get seats."

Though fans were relatively well behaved, some people jumped on top of Univision's news van, as well as KISS FM's truck, and then dove into the crowd at Addison and Clark. Police worked to get the fans off of the cars, but not before the KISS FM truck's roof caved in.

Later, as police were clearing Clark Street, a man was hit in the head with a glass bottle in the 1000 block of Waveland Avenue. The man and his sister were walking home to Waveland when "kids" emerged from a nearby alley and hit the man in the head, according to the sister who was telling police what happened. The man was seen on Waveland in a stretcher-chair with his head wrapped in gauze. He walked into an ambulance on his own.

There were also reports of a fight outside the Shell gas station at the corner of Halsted Street and Addison Street. Police had cordoned off the entrance to the convenience store, while a person on a stretcher was loaded into an ambulance. 

Bars agreed to serve drinks in plastic cups to avoid shattered glass or projectiles thrown at people, and the fire department was on hand to check for overcrowding, occupancy violations and fire exit clearance through the night. Police asked grocery and liquor stores to end sales at 10 p.m., and delivery trucks were banned from the area two hours before the game.

For the most part, the neighborhood avoided the chaos of 2013 Stanley Cup festivities, during which fans poured over metal barricades to party in the streets. Of course, with the win Wednesday, more rowdy nights in Wrigleyville are on the horizon.

The Cubs and Wrigley Field are 95 percent owned by a trust established for the benefit of the family of Joe Ricketts, owner and CEO of DNAinfo.com. Joe Ricketts has no direct involvement in the management of the iconic team.

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