See the History of Ticker-Tape Parades Beneath Your Feet on Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes

Today, the New York Liberty WNBA championship team will parade up Broadway through the "Canyon of Heroes" to celebrate their win, just like the US Women’s National Soccer Team did in 2019. The most recent ticker-tape parade at the Canyon of Heroes celebrated COVID-19 essential workers in 2021. Even if you are not on hand to celebrate today, you can take in the history of the ticker tape parade any day of the year, just by looking down while walking the sidewalks of Broadway. Full-width granite markers show the date of each parade and who it honored. 200 markers were installed by the Downtown Alliance in 2004 as part of a $22 million renovation of the Canyon of Heroes, and hopefully more will be added to account for the fifteen years of parades that have passed since. A biography published by the Downtown Alliance goes through the history of 208 parades and their honorees.

The term ticker tape comes from the paper strips that once showed the prices of stocks, and were thrown out of the windows of the buildings along Broadway during parades. But other bits of paper were thrown out the windows too: Laurie Gwen Shapiro writes in The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica, which covers some of Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s three ticker tape, parades that “torn telephone directories, and adding-machine tape” were also thrown from the windows above. [Side note: Admiral Byrd holds the record for the most parades]. Ticker tape was such a part of contemporary culture that one of the grotesques inside the Woolworth Building lobby is holding a strip. At the 2019 parade for the US Women’s National Soccer Team, most of the “ticker tapes” were actually legal documents. The red and white ticker was blasted just for the ceremony at City Hall that followed the parade.

The first-ever official ticker tape parade to honor a person took place in 1889 for Admiral George Dewey, who is generally attributed as the hero of the Battle of Manila Bay in the Spanish-American war. He was also given a temporary monumental arch next to Madison Square Park. But the ticker tape parade has its origins during a parade for the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, when pieces of paper were thrown out the windows.

According to Kenneth T. Jackson in The Encyclopedia of New York City, “during the 1920s, it became customary to hail arriving heads of state with a ticker-tape parade.” One of the most famous parades was for Charles Lindbergh in 1927 after his historic trans-Atlantic solo flight in the monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis. The New York Times estimated that four million people were in the crowd to celebrate.

The year before, a ticker-tape parade took place for American Olympic Champion, Gertrude Ederle in 1926, after she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. She also beat the records of five men who swam the channel before her. In 1928, New York City celebrated several other aviation records: one for Amelia Earhart’s transatlantic flight and a collective one for Captain Hermann Koehl, Major James Fitzmaurice, and Baron Günther Freiherr von Hünefeld for the longest westward transatlantic flight. Earhart would get another parade in 1932.

The largest flurry of ticker-tape parades took place during the post-WWII Cold War era, with 130 parades between 1945 and 1960. Kenneth T. Jackson writes, that more than half were for heads of state, “usually at the request of the U.S. Department of State. It’s worth noting, as the New York Daily News did, that many of the “heroes” honored with parades have later been dishonored: Lindbergh for his anti-semitism and white supremacist theories, and various Fascist and deposed world leaders. According to the Daily News, the Downtown Alliance decided to keep the plaques for those figures: Andy Breslau of the Alliance said, “We advocated that a fuller picture of history was the best solution. In order to take full stock of our city’s history, there’s a need to realize that these parades happened.”

Here are a few more photographs of the 2019 parade for the women’s soccer team:

Next, check out the Top 10 Secrets of City Hall.