Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

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Toni made herself right at home from her toasty perch

I found out later that the Ice Queen was Joan Rivers.

Horton the Elephant



Notice the color coordinated costumes on the balloon handlers

One of the larger marching bands.

Last year traffic through Times Square was discontinued on Broadway to make that part of Broadway into a pedestrian plaza. This in turn forced the decades old route of Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade to shift slightly over to 7th which now takes the event right by our apartment.

We started seeing small subtle signs of gearing up for the parade a few days before Thanksgiving. Christmas lights and window displays were popping up here and there. Overnight the familiar steel barriers appeared, at first in nested bunches of a couple dozen each at two or three spots per block. The next morning they were all in place in straight neat lines on both sides of 7th Avenue. On Wednesday we started seeing groups from the high school marching bands wending around the sidewalks in their school colors. From our vantage point watching these large blocks of color following the sidewalk one way and then take a right angle at the crosswalk another right angle at another sidewalk reminded me a little of the old Pac-Man game.

Thursday morning there was no fear of oversleeping as the crowd started gathering before 7:00 for the 9:00 start. Eventually there were 3.5 million spectators over the 3.8 mile route. There were also eleven high school marching bands, 800 clowns, and 8,000 participants altogether. The parade started at 77th and Central Park West and reached our corner about twenty minutes later before continuing south to Herald Square and Macy's flagship store on 34th St. There were many balloons of characters I had never heard of including the new-this-year Diary Of A Wimpy Kid. I did not realize that Bullwinkle and Underdog had been retired.

The last of it passed us about two hours later when Santa's float went by. I was amazed that the crowd had totally dispersed in just ten minutes or so leaving their litter of cups and bottles strewn everywhere. Then in another twenty all the litter was gone as well. New York really knows how operate a parade.