It’s nine a.m. on Thanksgiving Day. The year is 1924. Decked out in a dazzling array of colorful costumes, 10,000 Macy’s employees have gathered in Harlem. The skies are clear, the air is crisp, and the group begins its march downtown, accompanied by towering floats, animals on leashes from the Bronx Zoo, and clowns. The day holds profound significance for many first-generation immigrants in attendance. They are celebrating America!
A century later, the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, in New York City, has come to symbolize the Roaring 20s—a period of opulence and optimism after the horrors of World War I. Department stores were thriving, and the Macy’s flagship store, in Herald Square—the destination of the parade—was the crown jewel of American retail. Known as “the World’s Largest Store,” it covers more than one million square feet, stretching from Broadway to Seventh Avenue along 34th Street.
Times have changed, but the tradition endures—a fact not lost on the photographer Elizabeth Kahane, who first learned of the parade in the 1980s, when she moved to the Upper West Side. One late November night, she sat at her windowsill enthralled, watching as workers inflated the giant balloons near the American Museum of Natural History.
In 1998, when she accepted a marriage proposal from her husband-to-be, Bill, Kahane had one stipulation for their new home: “I have to be on Central Park,” she said, “and have a view of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade!” They moved to 64th Street and Central Park West.
For the past 25 years, Kahane has followed the same pre-parade ritual. She has her windows cleaned, orders lox and bagels from Barney Greengrass, and perches on the ledge with “one foot in, one foot out,” her camera at the ready.
Many of the images she’s captured—now compiled in a new book, Come Join the Parade!!—verge on the surreal: enormous turkey floats, inflatable Hello Kitty planes, and stars such as Tony Bennett and Paula Abdul. “I wanted to invite you into my home,” Kahane writes in the introduction, “[to] share this quintessential New York spectacle with me.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at air mail
