Traffic in lower Manhattan is always bad, but is today impassable even for pedestrians. The New York Liberty are getting a ticker-tape parade for their WNBA championship. First, congrats to the Liberty and happy days to their fans. Second, there is something very New York about holding a parade specifically to dump tons of garbage on the heads of the honorees. Third, since stock tickers disappeared some sixty years ago, it’s generally shredded scrap paper and other confetti rather than non-existent ticker tape.
Looking at the list of honorees over the last 140 years, sports players and teams, and military heroes have got most of the parades. Visiting foreign dignitaries have been honored, although that’s a bit risky: you can through a parade for Marshal Pétain in 1931 and regret having done so a decade later. There were a spate of pilots getting parades in the 1920s and 30s, followed by astronauts in the 60s and 70s, for setting various records in flight. Here’s Charles Lindbergh (without a hat) in 1927, when he was famous only for his pioneering solo flight across the Atlantic:
The man seated next to him is Mayor Jimmy Walker, whose political career ended rather badly in resignation and fleeing the country; the man in the top hat in the seat in front of Lindbergh and Walker was Grover Whalen, who did a little bit of everything in and around the city government from the 1910s to the 30s. The men in white hats are NYPD.
One of the later flying-heroes parades was for Gus Grissom and John Young, after their successful flight in Gemini 3; Grissom died two years later in a horrific fire during testing for the scrapped Apollo 1 mission, proving, if nothing else, the dangers of new technology.
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