2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – Part 1

Other than eating way too much turkey and trimmings on Thursday, my main activity on Thanksgiving was going to the parade. No big surprise as I seem to go to most NYC parades and the Macy Parade is the best known of NYC parades.

A co-worker of mine has a family tradition where friends and all are invited to their place for breakfast and everyone leaves for the parade around 8:30am. Well, not quite everyone, but most. The traditional gathering place is just inside Central Park at the intersection of Central Park West and 72nd Street. That’s just opposite the Dakota, which readers will know is one of my favorite buildings.

Yes, it looks like the waiting line for the parade is 30+ people deep. Incredible. Most parades I’m in the front or even all alone in the front. In some of the better attended parades I can end up behind a couple of people. I’m never 30+ people back! The sidewalks are jammed with families and people are already two or three deep several hours before the parade (at least when the weather’s good).

And the weather was spectacular. And so was the crowd. Lots of families with little kids.

This is my third time at the parade. I always see a phenonmena I call “dad-duty” which is to hoist your child on your shoulders. Every dad with a child under a hundred pounds seems to be involved in it.

For the first time, I saw a mom pulling “dad-duty”. I didn’t have the heart to take the picture, though. Her little girl really wanted to watch.

If you’re my height and you want to watch the parade, here’s one of the typical sights: a marching band.

Yep, you can see their heads, and that’s about it. And this is before the crowd got even larger and every dad was enlisted into dad-duty.

But the balloons show up very, very nicely. They are big and they are small.

72nd Street is your standard wind-tunnel street in Manhattan. Just to the west (6 blocks or so) is the Hudson River and the wind whips across there faster than you would expect. At this intersection, there have been accidents with balloons being blown around. For the parade, they put up a wind sock and they removed a light fixture from one of the street poles (it fell and seriously injured someone several years ago).

You can see most of the floats that go by, at least when they have elevated areas.

In the above, you can see part of the “wall of dads” that later appeared. But here’s my favorite “dad-duty” guy. He’s got two big boys and he’s hoisting them at the same time.

You can barely see the poor guy.

But the balloons are the hit of the parade, without them it wouldn’t be the Macy’s Parade.

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