Santa, Zoo Animals, and 10,000 Marchers: The First Macy's Parade, 1924
On November 27, 1924, Macy's employees staged a six-mile parade with zoo animals and Santa Claus — and accidentally launched a century-long American tradition.
The idea came from the shop floor. In 1924, Macy's had just opened its enormous new flagship at Herald Square — then the world's largest retail space — and many of its employees were first-generation European immigrants who missed the festival parades of their home countries. "There were a lot of folks who worked for Macy's who were immigrants from Europe," the parade's later executive producer Susan Tercero would recall, "and when they got to the holiday season, a lot of them came together" to propose a holiday parade of their own. Management, seeing both a gift to the staff and a fine advertisement for the store, said yes.
On Thanksgiving morning, November 27, 1924, the first parade stepped off. For its first three years it was billed as the Macy's Christmas Parade. Some 10,000 spectators turned out to watch a six-mile procession wind down from Harlem along Broadway to Herald Square: Macy's employees dressed as clowns, cowboys, and knights, brass bands, floats built around Mother Goose nursery scenes — and, astonishingly to modern eyes, live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo, including elephants, lions, and tigers. A contemporary newspaper account described "a retinue of clowns, freaks, animals and floats."
Bringing up the rear, as he still does a century later, came Santa Claus. At Herald Square he climbed to the top of the store's 34th Street entrance, where he was crowned the "King of the Kiddies" — and with a trumpet blast, Macy's unveiled its Christmas window displays, officially opening the holiday shopping season. The parade was such a hit that the very next day, Macy's announced it would become an annual event.
It has changed a good deal since. In 1927, after concerns that the roaring zoo animals were frightening children, Macy's hired the puppeteer Tony Sarg to invent an alternative: giant helium-filled balloons, shaped like cartoon characters, with Felix the Cat leading the way. The parade was broadcast on local television as early as 1939, and by 1940 an estimated one million spectators lined the route. It went on hiatus from 1942 to 1944, when the war effort claimed the helium and rubber; it came back in 1945 bigger than ever, and it has marched every Thanksgiving since.
What began as an employees' homesick idea on a November morning in 1924 is now watched by millions in person and on television every Thanksgiving — the unofficial starting gun of the American holiday season.
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