Festivals and Parades
New York, with its many ethnic communities and cultural venues, has a large number of major parades and street festivals. SummerStage in Central Park is one of about 1,200 free concerts, dance, theater, and spoke word events citywide sponsored by the City Parks Foundation.
The Village Halloween Parade is an annual holiday parade and street pageant presented the night of every Halloween (October 31) in Greenwich Village. Stretching more than a mile, this cultural event draws two million spectators, fifty thousand costumed participants, dancers, artists and circus performers, dozens of floats bearing live bands and other musical and performing acts, and a worldwide television audience of one hundred million.
The Feast of San Gennaro, originally a one-day religious commemoration, is now an 11-day street fair held in mid-September in Manhattan's Little Italy. Centered on Mulberry Street, which is closed to traffic for the occasion, the festival generally features parades, street vendors, sausages and zeppole, games, and a religious candlelit procession which begins immediately after a celebratory mass at the Church of the Most Precious Blood. Another festival is held with the same attractions at New York's other Little Italy, in the Fordham/Belmont community in the Bronx. The streets are closed to traffic and the festivities begin early in the morning and proceed late into the night.
Other major parades include the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, presented by Macy's Department Store and lasting three hours on Thanksgiving Day, which features enormous inflatable balloons.
A major component of New Year's Eve celebrations in the United States is the "ball dropping" on top of One Times Square that is broadcast live on national television. A 1,070-pound, 6-foot-diameter Waterford Crystal ball, high above Times Square, is lowered starting at 23:59:00 and reaching the bottom of its tower at the stroke of midnight (00:00:00). New York Harbor From 1982 to 1988, New York City dropped a large apple in recognition of its nickname, "The Big Apple." Dick Clark hosted televised coverage of the event from 1972 to 2011 with his show, Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. For about four decades, until one year before his death in 1977, Canadian violinist and bandleader Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians serenaded the United States from the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue. Their recording of the traditional song Auld Lang Syne still plays as the first song of the new year in Times Square.
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Famous quotes containing the words festivals and/or parades:
“This is certainly not the place for a discourse about what festivals are for. Discussions on this theme were plentiful during that phase of preparation and on the whole were fruitless. My experience is that discussion is fruitless. What sets forth and demonstrates is the sight of events in action, is living through these events and understanding them.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“The era of long parades past an official podium filled with cold faces is gone. Celebrating is now a right, not a duty.”
—Lothar De Maizière (b. 1940)