On this day in New York · August 13, 1969
New York Gives Apollo 11 a Ticker-Tape Parade
Three weeks after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, about four million New Yorkers buried Broadway in confetti to welcome the crew home.
The facts
- Date
- August 13, 1969
- Route
- Bowling Green up Broadway to City Hall, then on to the United Nations
- Crowd estimate
- About four million people lined the streets
- Same-day double header
- The astronauts left New York for a second ticker-tape parade in Chicago that afternoon
On August 13, 1969, New York City threw a ticker-tape parade for the crew of Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, fresh off a mandatory quarantine in Houston after their moon landing three weeks before. Mayor John Lindsay rode with the astronauts up Broadway from Bowling Green to City Hall, breaking with the old custom of mayors watching from the reviewing stand, then handed them the city's Gold Medal before a short ceremony at the United Nations. An estimated four million people packed the route, including the stretch of Lower Broadway now known as the Canyon of Heroes, and on 42nd Street the paper came down so thick that witnesses said the astronauts could barely see out of their car. New York got three and a half hours with them before they flew off for a second ticker-tape parade in Chicago that same afternoon, and that night President Nixon gave them the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a state dinner in Los Angeles.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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On 42nd Street the confetti, made up more of paper towels and pages from telephone directories than tickertape, was so dense that the astronauts could hardly see or be seen as the motorcade turned east.
The New York Times, "Surging Crowds Fill the Streets in New York," August 14, 1969
Source: Spacewhippet
Why it still matters
It was the moment the moon landing stopped being something New Yorkers watched on TV and became something the whole city physically celebrated together, and it's the parade that cemented Lower Broadway's Canyon of Heroes as the place New York throws its confetti when someone does something extraordinary.
Sources
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