Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloons

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloons being inflated with the Museum of Natural History in the background. West 77th street and Central Park West. New York City, New York.

See them all here, more added all the time :) Labels: Macys Parade Balloons

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is an annual parade presented by Macy's. The tradition started in 1924, In 1924, the inaugural parade (originally known as the Macy's Christmas Parade and later the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Christmas Parade was staged by the store.

Employees and professional entertainers marched from 145th Street in Harlem to Macy's flagship store on 34th Street dressed in costumes.There were floats, professional bands and live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo. At the end of that first parade, as has been the case with every parade since, Santa Claus was welcomed.

Large animal-shaped balloons, produced by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, replaced the live animals in 1927 when the Felix the Cat balloon made its debut. Felix was filled with air, but by the next year, helium was used to fill the expanding cast of balloons.

Image License: I, (sookietex) the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant any entity the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

If This image is subject to copyright in your jurisdiction, i (sookietex) the copyright holder have irrevocably released all rights to it, allowing it to be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited in any way by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, with or without attribution of the author, as if in the public domain.

>

At the finale of the 1928 parade, the balloons were released into the sky where they unexpectedly burst. The following year they were redesigned with safety valves to allow them to float for a few days. Address labels were sewn into them, so that whomever found and mailed back the discarded balloon received a gift from Macy's

Text: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.