Picture it. New York City, 1924. You loaded up the family and drove your Ford Model-T through the dusty streets of Manhattan to witness the newest American spectacle alongside 10,000 other holiday revelers: a “retinue of clowns, freaks, animals and floats, [and] the bewhiskered man in red,” otherwise known as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Little did these merrymakers know that on this exact spot, 73 years later, future generations would witness the brutal execution of a children’s icon at the hands of local police.
The New York Times reporter who attended the inaugural event, no doubt sporting a jaunty fedora and pencil mustache, experienced a parade with far less fanfare than the extravaganza of today. He likely wasn’t, for instance, advised to wear an adult diaper in case nature called and he simply couldn’t give up his prime vantage point to answer.
Long gone are the days of modest 10,000-person crowds, as well. The modern Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade draws an astounding 3.5 million to observe the clowns, floats, and colossal balloons in person (no freaks – unless you count those among the 3.5 million kicking off the holiday season by willfully pissing themselves).
In the parade’s first few runs, there were no balloons at all. Then relatively small ones. Then, gradually, they morphed into the 100-foot-long, 700-pound leviathans we know today.
The Parade is now embarking on its 99th journey to the Manhattan Macy’s, and in those many treks there have been—one might say, a few incidents. The number is, frankly, impressively small considering we’re entrusting small groups of people to handle building-sized balloons filled with, like, 12,000 cubic feet of helium every year.
There was that one year, though. The bad one. The one so notorious it has its own Wikipedia page. The one that inspired the now-standard issue “How to Not Totally Fuck Up the Parade” handbook that every balloon handler receives upon volunteering for the task.
It was 1997, and countless children across the country anxiously awaited the arrival of the nursery rhyme-singing, positive message-giving purple dinosaur, Barney—in 58-foot-tall balloon form. New York City was experiencing unusually high winds, but as all the best in show business say (or so I’m told), the show must go on.
So, hundreds of handlers bravely braced against the gale-force winds sweeping through the streets and set out with their elephantine cargo. A mistake, as it turns out.
With 2 million people huddled along the streets of Manhattan, the wind whipped so hard it sent the six-story-tall Cat and the Hat balloon crashing into a lamppost. Part of the metal post broke off, falling like a missile straight into the head of a parade-goer who suffered serious injuries and was in a coma for a month.
Mayhem erupted as the NYPD frantically worked to prevent further balloon-related injuries. “Somebody give me a knife, quick!” an inspector shouted, before plunging a five-inch-long blade through the tail of the Pink Panther, whose handlers feared they would be smothered to death by endless folds of pink polyurethane.
The focus to this day, however, remains on Barney—an A-list celebrity in ’90s America. The dino suffered a rather brutal death when, with his many young fans looking on, cops pulled him from the air, stabbing and stomping him until the grinning purple threat was neutralized.
Many shrieked in horror while one somewhat morbid child famously screamed, “Barney’s dead! He’s dead! Yeah!“
It took several injuries, two hospitalizations, a $395 million lawsuit against the City of New York, and the barbaric murder of a beloved children’s character on live television but organizers finally cut down on the outlaw mud show bullshit and put a few rules in place, including a ban on larger, unwieldy balloons.
But as 1997 Macy’s Parade attendee Christina Benitez so succinctly told the New York Times on that fateful day: “This is our culture, the American spirit of fun.”
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