Pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked the traditional Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, gluing their hands to 6th Avenue in Manhattan.
Balloons and floats intended to travel down the street were blocked, forcing the NYPD to divert the parade, The New York Post reported. The parade traditionally ends at Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have glued their hands to 6th Avenue, disrupting the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; floats, bands and balloons are being diverted. pic.twitter.com/nYKLGyev87
— Matthew Chayes (@chayesmatthew) November 23, 2023
In another attempt to turn the parade political, members of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts waved Palestinian flags.
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade began in 1924; the same year Detroit had a Thanksgiving Day Parade. The only older Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia started in 1920. The Macy’s parade usually lasts roughly three hours and has been nationally televised since 1953 on NBC; Macy’s employees, friends and family work as volunteers for the parade.
Between 1942 and 1944 the parade was suspended because of World War II; rubber and helium were needed for the war.
Macy’s was founded by Rowland Hussey Macy, who established a “R. H. Macy & Co.” on Sixth Avenue in 1858. The Macy family owned the company until they sold it to Isidor and Nathan Straus in 1895, who moved the flagship store to Herald Square in 1902. Isidor Straus died with his wife Ida on the RMS Titanic in 1912. When it became clear the ship was sinking; Ida refused to leave the ship without her husband.
Titanic survivor Colonel Archibald Gracie said he asked a ship’s officer if Isidor could join a lifeboat with his wife, but Straus refused to enter a lifeboat while women and children were still onboard. Ida Straus said, “I will not be separated from my husband. As we have lived, so will we die, together,” instead giving her maid her fur coat and insisting the maid get into the lifeboat. The last witnesses saw of the Straus couple they were arm-in-arm.