Watch out! You might be stepping on a ticker tape parade.
The first ticker tape parade happened in New York City in 1886. What is ticker tape, you ask, and what does it have to do with a parade?
In 1886, there was a parade on Broadway to celebrate the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The people who worked in the offices overlooking the parade started throwing ticker tape out the windows as a way to have fun and be part of the parade. Ticker tape is what was used to transmit stock price information over telegraph lines from the mid-1800s until around 1970.
There is no ticker tape anymore, so now confetti is used, but the name “ticker tape parade” stuck.
Greeter Richard Drezen knows a lot about ticker tape parades and shared that knowledge with a group of Greeters in a walk up the “Canyon of Heroes.” This is the part of Broadway starting at the southern tip of Manhattan in front of the Museum of the American Indian on Bowling Green, up to City Hall Park.
Richard told us that ships would dock in lower Manhattan, and the people chosen to be honored would be taken by horse-drawn carriage (later by car) up Broadway to be met by the mayor at City Hall.
In 2004, the Alliance for Downtown New York began embedding granite strips into sidewalks along Broadway as commemorative plaques for each parade.
The first “official” ticker tape parade was in 1899 with two million people turning out to honor Admiral George Dewey following his crushing defeat of the Spanish fleet in Manilla Bay, the Philippines.
In 1910 New York City Mayor William J. Gaynor realized the city needed someone to oversee these parades. He appointed Grover A. Whalen, the manager of a local department store. Whalen is credited with organizing more than 100 ticker tape parades before his retirement in 1953.
In addition to Olympic heroes like Jesse Owens or famous explorers like Richard E. Byrd or aviators like Amelia Earhart or Charles Lindbergh, there was no shortage of individuals to honor.
Grover Whalen even invited important heads of state like Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and Charles de Gaulle of France to come to New York City to be honored with a ticker tape parade. But there are also parades for local sports teams like the New York Yankees who racked up a total of nine parades, proving that New York City is indeed a sports town.
Our last stop was the 2021 plaque commemorating the Health Care Professionals and Essential Workers during the Covid Pandemic. We all looked at each other and agreed that these people were the true heroes of an unbearable time in our history.