Love Attending a Ticker-Tape Parade? Thank the Alliance! 

It’s our 30th anniversary, and we’re self-celebrating. Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out 30 stories about 30 of our biggest accomplishments, including everything from our daily public safety and sanitation work, to our small business outreach, to how we helped the neighborhood navigate challenges and even tragedies. You’ll be able to find these stories on our website, as well as in our weekly newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. 

After more than a century, the New York City ticker-tape parade remains a phenomenon familiar throughout the world. Invented in 1867, ticker tape was a one-inch-wide ribbon of paper on which the “ticker” machine recorded telegraphed stock quotes. Brokerage firms using the ticker machine proliferated in Lower Manhattan, and provided an abundant supply of scrap paper. In the latter part of the 19th century, skyscrapers replaced low buildings and turned the narrow downtown streets into stone canyons. Office workers quickly discovered that ticker tape sent swirling into the air created a dramatic effect. The first officially organized ticker-tape parades welcomed home the victorious soldiers of World War I.

From 1919 to the present day, the mayor of New York City has decided who will receive a ticker-tape parade, like championship-winning New York sports teams or local heroes, as was the case with the 2021 Essential Workers parade celebrating those who kept the city running amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, Lower Manhattan has hosted 209 ticker-tape parades in total, the most recent of which was held for the New York Liberty in October 2024.

Downtown Alliance plays a key role in these ticker-tape parades. First, since 1995, our Operations team has sourced the “ticker-tape” used in the parades (now confetti), to such aplomb that our former Operations leader Joe Timpone was dubbed the city’s “Confetti King” in the New York Post. During the parades, our Public Safety team monitors the crowds on Broadway to ensure parade participants and viewers stay safe; post parade, our Sanitation team members assist the Department of Sanitation in the cleanup. Additionally, for the last 22 years, the Alliance has embedded a granite marker for each parade in the sidewalks along Broadway, stretching along the ticker-tape parade route from Battery Place to Chambers Street. So look down while walking on Broadway, unless it’s a parade — then look up!