Everything You Need to Know About Ticker Tape Parades

Congratulations: you just experienced one of the only legal ways for thousands of people to congregate in one of the world’s biggest cities to throw trash at famous sportsmen. For foreigners and non-native New Yorkers, this might seem like a bizarre (and, in any other circumstance, disrespectful) tradition, but its roots are deep in the culture of our city and its history rich with fascinating– and not so fascinating– events.

Time Magazine ran a very thorough piece chronicling the history of the ticker tape parade, which began in 1886 to celebrate the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. Predictably, the parade is reserved for special sporting occassions, major war victories or space successes, but (perhaps also predictably) the excuse to throw away some “sensitive” financial material proved too tempting to miss out on, prompting parades for mostly anyone that took the time to come visit the United States. As the American Heritage blog reports, the VIPs honored with their own ticker-tape parade include “Prince Ludovico Spado Potenziani, governor of Rome, and some whom the world wishes it could forget, such as Pierre Laval, who was premier of France when he was honored in 1931 and was shot as a traitor to France in 1945.” Fortunately for the great sanitation workers of this city, the fervor died down sometime in the 1950s, and to this day the parades are reserved almost exclusively for sporting or major political events. The Yankees, who are honored with a parade for every World Series they win, hadn’t earned one since 2000.