The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is 100 years old. Here’s a look through the years.

The first Macy’s parade, scheduled to take place on Thanksgiving morning 100 years ago, promised to be a great event.

A newspaper advertisement placed by R.H. Macy & Co. in the Brooklyn Eagle announced the new event: “A huge Christmas parade will be held in Manhattan, in which Santa Claus, accompanied by an array of wild animals, bareback riders, bands and clowns, will come …to Macy’s store. The elaborate Christmas spectacle will take place there.”

The newspaper ad worked.

On that Thanksgiving morning in 1924, police estimated a crowd of nearly 10,000 people waited outside the Macy’s flagship store on West 34th Street to await the arrival of live bears and elephants and floats featuring the nursery rhyme characters Little Miss Muffet and Little Red Riding Hood experience and jolly old St. Nick sounding a trumpet at the unveiling of the department store’s elaborate Christmas window display Macy’s to announce.

And so the Macy’s Christmas Parade – renamed the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade two years later – began its legendary run.

While 2024 will mark the 100th anniversary of this now-iconic annual event, it will only be the 98th time the parade has taken place. The parade was suspended from 1942 to 1944 to save materials for World War II. According to news reports, the parade’s return in 1945 attracted two million spectators.

In 1948, the parade was broadcast on national television for the first time after gaining popularity in the 1947 film “The Miracle on 34th Street.”

The parade has been held every year since, including a pre-recorded, audience-free performance in a single block outside the Macy’s store in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although New York’s parade is the most famous, Macy’s was not the first U.S. department store to host a parade on Thanksgiving Day.

In 1920, Gimbels held a parade in Philadelphia in which costumed store employees escorted Santa Claus through the city streets to the Gimbels store on Thanksgiving morning.

Although Gimbels closed in 1986, Philadelphia continues to host its own annual Thanksgiving parade.

Other cities with a long-standing Thanksgiving parade tradition include Detroit, where the first parade also took place in 1924, and Chicago, where the first parade took place in 1934.

But many key features of the New York parade, from an innovative competitive event to the design, construction and testing of the popular Macy’s balloons and intricate floats, are directly related to the Garden State.

Newark’s Bamberger Parade

In 1929, Macy’s purchased Bamberger’s, a department store chain based in Newark. The New Jersey store hosted its own popular Thanksgiving parade from 1931 to 1957.

At its peak, the Newark parade, which wound through the city and ended at the Bamberger’s flagship store on Market Street, attracted more than 600,000 people and featured entertainers such as Abbott & Costello, Guy Lombardo, Walter Winchell and Janet Leigh.

In 1955, Bamberger’s held its first night parade on the eve of Thanksgiving. The “Parade of Light,” televised on CBS, featured floats and performers decorated with colorful lights. Actress Terry Moore and comedian Phil Silvers served as queen and king of the parade.

The Parade of Light would continue for two more years. The 1957 edition featured attractions including world heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson, who took on a lion named “Gorgonzola the Great,” and Wimbledon champion Althea Gibson, who hurled fake snowballs into the crowd with a gold tennis racket.

The Bamberg parade was canceled in 1958 due to declining attendance, which store managers at the time attributed to potential parade-goers preferring to watch the festivities on television.

Macy’s Parade Studio

As Macy’s added more balloons, floats and other elements to its parade over the years, the design and manufacture of parade elements was completed at various locations in New York, Secaucus and North Bergen.

In 1968, Macy’s Parade Studio opened in Hoboken in a former Tootsie Roll factory at Willow Avenue and 15th Street. There, workers designed and built floats, balloons and other parade attractions for 43 years.

Macy’s moved the studio to Moonachie in 2011. About 100 artists, construction workers and balloon technicians work there year-round to prepare the parade attractions for Thanksgiving morning.

Macy’s Balloon Festival

Macy’s began conducting test flights for its parade balloons on the grounds of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken in 1993. About 90 Stevens students, staff and alumni helped inflate and carry the balloons for the test flights a few weeks before the parade and prepared them. Balloons were released again in Manhattan the night before Thanksgiving, according to The Jersey Journal.

The annual test event, which later became known as Macy’s Balloonfest, was moved to the grounds of the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford in 2009. Since then it has been held every year at either the Meadowlands or Citi Field in New York.

This year’s Balloon Festival, which featured new additions such as Minnie Mouse, Marshall from Paw Patrol and an updated Spider-Man balloon, was held Nov. 1 at MetLife Stadium.

New Jersey marching bands

Brass bands from New Jersey also shaped the celebrations and performed in the parade as early as the 1950s.

In fact, the Bergenfield High School marching band has performed in the parade 20 times, the first time in 1953 and most recently in 2000. The last New Jersey high school marching band to perform in the parade was Piscataway High School in 2002 .

And last year, the Rutgers University Marching Scarlet Knights made their debut in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with about 350 band members walking the 2.5-mile parade route from West 77th Street to Herald Square.

Rutgers was one of ten bands selected from over 100 applications for the 2023 parade.

“To be invited to march … is an incredible honor and, quite frankly, a wish on the wish list of our band members, faculty and directors,” Todd Nichols, Rutgers band director, said when the band was selected.

The 98th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will take place November 28th starting at 8:30 a.m. and will be broadcast live on NBC and Peacock.

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Vinessa Erminio can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @VinessaNJ.