The nearly century-old Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is gearing up for its 99th outing tomorrow, and expectations are high. The event has quietly become the most-watched entertainment broadcast in the country for three consecutive years, surpassing the Oscars and even the World Series, as reported by NPR.
The parade’s earliest era offered a very different spectacle from the giant balloons and celebrity performances we know today. The inaugural 1924 edition featured live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo, marched from 145th Street to Herald Square by Macy’s European immigrant employees who wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving “with a European parade tradition,” said Valerie Paley, senior vice-president at the New-York Historical Society.
Television has supercharged the event’s reach since its first national broadcast 1946, turning a New York City tradition into a nationwide holiday ritual. Today, the operation looks more like a film studio than a parade workshop. Inside the sprawling Macy’s Studio warehouse in New Jersey, carpenters, seamstresses, welders, painters, and sculptors work year-round to design, build, and test every float, costume, and helium balloon.
“It does sometimes feel like when I come to work that I’m going to an amusement park,” said Kathleen Wright, director of production operations at Macy’s Studio.
Each float is engineered to be modular, breaking down into sections that can be trucked into Manhattan overnight and rebuilt on-site before dawn. The production cost last year was estimated at around $13 million, all paid for by Macy’s, per Fast Company.
And yet, even with all the industrial precision, corporate logistics, and oversized pop-culture balloons, historians say the parade’s real power comes from something intangible.
“When you go to the parade, you unconsciously enter a space that’s sacred,” said historian Doug Matthews.
Tomorrow morning, thousands will line Manhattan’s streets and millions more will tune in nationwide to watch that sacred tradition unfold once again.
