On November 6, the Yankees celebrated their 27th World Series championship with a ticker-tape parade on the “Canyon of Heroes” in Lower Manhattan. I had an appointment that morning, so I didn’t actually show up early to attend the parade, but I did head downtown long enough to snap a few photos from afar. So many people showed up to watch that I couldn’t get anywhere near Broadway, but even though I was confined to Battery Park and Trinity Place (which runs parallel to Broadway), I still got showered with confetti! People were even throwing it from buildings on Trinity Place, a full block from the parade route.
The crowd…
…and the confetti!
I simply had to take the opportunity to see this for myself, because ticker-tape parades are such an iconic feature of New York City life — and because they are such an uncommon sight. In the 1920s there were 24 ticker-tape parades; in the 1970s there were two. When a parade does take place, it’s like a scene from history come back to life.
I looked through my little library of books about New York City and found some information on ticker-tape parades of the past that is absolutely fascinating, considering that the parades rarely take place nowadays unless a local sports team has won a national championship, or unless the city decides to honor its veterans. It’s hard to imagine massive crowds turning out for them today, but in the first half of the 20th century, aviators, winners of the British Open golf tournament, monarchs of foreign countries, swimmers of the English Channel, and Antarctic explorers regularly received the honor. (Since the assassination of JFK, the practice of welcoming visiting heads of state with ticker-tape parades has all but ceased.) The latter half of the century saw a great number of astronauts being honored. Almost all ticker-tape parades follow the same route on the “Canyon of Heroes” — the stretch of Broadway between Battery Park and City Hall Park — and almost all conclude with the honorees being received by the mayor at City Hall, though the parade for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 stretched on for seven miles. Today there are black granite plaques embedded in the sidewalk on lower Broadway with the names of past honorees and the dates of their parades.
The first ticker-tape parade on lower Broadway was a spontaneous celebration of the opening of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. Office workers tossed ticker tape — paper used in machines which provided updated stock market quotes — out of their windows onto the parade route. In 1919, Mayor Grover Whelan established ticker-tape parades as an official function of the municipal government, and the U.S. Department of State began to arrange parades for leaders of foreign countries.
Important figures from Winston Churchill and Pope John Paul II to the United States Olympic team have received ticker-tape parades, but I think my favorite honoree is Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, an aviator who in 1938 was scheduled to make a return flight from New York to California, but instead flew east to Ireland in a small, unsound plane. (Most people believe that Corrigan intended all along to fly the wrong way — having been previously rejected in his application to aviation authorities to make the transatlantic flight, he appears to have taken matters into his own hands, and disguised the planned trip as a mistake — but he never publicly admitted it.) He received a mild punishment and, in an era in which solo transoceanic flights were still a rarity, a proper reception in the Canyon of Heroes.
The headline of the New York Post article about his parade read “HAIL WRONG WAY CORRIGAN” — and it was printed backwards. Clearly, when it comes to the Post and their attention-grabbing headlines, some things never change.
