A ticker-tape parade honoring war combat veterans who served in post-9/11 wars is coming to lower Manhattan this summer, according to the mayor’s office.
Dubbed the “Homecoming of Heroes” and slated for July 6, the parade down the “Canyon of Heroes” from the Battery to City Hall formally recognizes more than 2.9 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan following the September 11 terror attacks.
The ticker-tape parade, set to be the first of its kind in a major US city, will offer “a powerful opportunity to highlight the contributions that service members continue to make,” Mayor Eric Adams said during a fleet week event Thursday.
“It would pay tribute to the extraordinary service, sacrifice and resilience of the post 9/11 combat veterans who did so much to protect our city and our nation in the wake of the deadliest attack on our homeland since Pearl Harbor,” he added.
More than 7,000 American troops died in the wars and contingency operations, and another 53,436 were injured, according to New York City Department of Veterans’ Services James Hendon.
Another 31,177 veterans died by suicide, he said.
“We’re doing what we can to remember and never forget our people and their loved ones,” Hendon said.
The last ticker-tape parade was held in October for the New York Liberty, which celebrated the WNBA team’s first championship win.
While actual ticker-tape from “ticker” machines was originally used as confetti in the early days of the parades, the Downtown Alliance now provides bags of crinkled packing paper for the event.
Roughly 2,000 pounds of the paper – costing the alliance about $5,000 – was dropped on the seafoam-green party, which drew an estimated 80,000 attendees to lower Manhattan.
Scores of bags of confetti were doled out the day before the parade to about two dozen buildings along Broadway that requested them.
If the “Homecoming of Heroes” is anything like the Downtown Alliance’s other ticker-tape parades, the combat veterans will be memorialized in stone with one of over 200 of the alliance’s granite sidewalk plaques along the “Canyon of Heroes” sometime after the parade.
The plaques are designed by Pentagram, who also designed One World Trade Center’s engraved cornerstone, and are manufactured by a New York City-based architect.
“The whole process of ordering, lettering, shipping and installation takes about two to three months total,” a Downtown Alliance rep told The Post.
“This will be more than just a parade,” Adams said Thursday. “It will serve as a symbol of belonging, of closure and of collective pride.
“It will be a sign that our veterans and their families matter to us – not just during the wartime they fight, but in the peacetime they help achieve.
“It marks a small seed of our gratitude and our commitment to them: the seed that allows us all to water the tree of liberty so that we can sit under its shade.”
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