It was a sight to behold: elephants marching through New York City streets, thousands of spectators crushed four and five deep on the sidewalks hoping to get a glimpse of the creatures.
It was Thanksgiving Day 1924, and the elephants – accompanied by bears, monkeys, tigers, camels, donkeys and lions – were residents of the Central Park zoo, trotted out for a brand-new parade, sponsored by the department store Macy’s.
The parade, which also featured clowns, festive nursery-rhyme themed floats and Santa Claus himself, was such a spectacular hit that the store decided to hold the parade annually. That’s how the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, now often called “America’s parade”, started 100 years ago.
But the parade wasn’t only a publicity or marketing stunt. The parade was started by employees of the store, many of whom were first-generation immigrants.
“Most of them were European immigrants who wanted to celebrate American Thanksgiving with a European parade tradition,” Valerie Paley, senior vice-president at the New-York Historical Society. “The first parade … it just had a kind of festive, but very homegrown, Macy’s aspect to it.”
Will Coss, the current executive producer of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, told the Guardian that he thinks of the parade as “a gift to America by Macy’s colleagues”.
Originally called the Macy’s Christmas parade, to mark the start of the season, it was also much longer than today’s 2.5-mile (4km) stretch. In early years, the animals, employees and clowns marched all the way from 145th Street down to 34th Street.
After only three years, “they decided to get rid of the zoo animal idea because evidently the tigers and lions scared the children!” Paley told the Guardian with a laugh.
Instead, they were replaced with animal-shaped “upside-down marionettes inflated with air and carried on sticks”, described Coss. “It wasn’t until 1929, the sixth parade, when helium-filled balloons were first introduced.”
Then started a new tradition: after the parade was over, organizers would simply release the balloons into the sky with a Macy’s return address label sewed into it. Anyone intrepid enough to find one and return it would win a prize.
But the plan had consequences. In 1932, a 22-year-old pilot almost died and killed a passenger when, after the parade, she attempted to catch a cat-shaped balloon 5,000ft in the air.
“The desire to behead one of the huge helium-filled ‘beasts’ released … prompted Miss Annette Gibson to dive her plane toward the grotesque-shaped balloon,” reported a UP wire report published soon after. “The balloon twisted under the impact and wound itself around the plane’s wing. The ship was thrown into a tail spin and shot toward the earth.”
The passenger, her flight instructor, managed to take control of the plane and avoid a crash, saving both their lives. That would be the last year Macy’s offered a reward for collected balloons.
The parade continued annually until 1942, when it was canceled out of respect for the second world war.
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“The Macy’s president, Jack Straus, in 1942 made the announcement that the parade would be canceled during wartime,” Paley said. “The mayor was at his side and Straus deflated the parade’s Green Dragon balloon and donated the rubber to the US military. So all told, Macy’s donated approximately 650lbs of balloon rubber to the fight, and that was only fitting during war time.”
The parade resumed in 1945. But those lost years meant that even though this year is the 100th anniversary of the parade, it will only be the 98th parade to take place.
Other less-than-joyous moments in the parade’s 100-year history included 1963’s parade, which took place just four days after President John F Kennedy’s assassination. Even amid national mourning, the parade still went on.
“Macy’s decided that its cancellation would be a disappointment to millions of children,” reported the New York Times.
Though, Paley noted, “the parade floats were draped in black” that year “just to acknowledge the passing of the president”.
This year, an estimated 3.5 million people will watch the parade in person and a stunning 30 million are expected to watch on television, turning what was once a small immigrant-founded parade into a national sensation.
“Everyone tunes in,” Paley said. “It has a kind of universal quality … It becomes a kind of national symbol of the beginning of the holiday.”
