vip in the city

A Giant parade

The entire city was still on a high from the New York Giants’ stunning win over the imperfect New England Patriots on Sunday night — a game seen by 97.5 million viewers, the most in Super Bowl history.

And now, on to the celebration! (People of Boston, in the meantime, cried.) On my commute into the office this morning, the subways were crammed with rowdy, banner-wielding, face-painted, blue-jersey clad fans — more than a few of whom looked suspiciously young — all heading into the Financial District for the Giants victory parade through the Canyon of Heroes.

An estimated 3 million football fans attended the ticker tape parade which began at 11AM at Battery Place and culminated with a 1PM City Hall Plaza ceremony, where winning Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented keys to the city to the team’s players, coaches and owners. Streets around the downtown parade route were closed beginning at 7AM to accommodate early-arriving spectators, some of whom began staking out spots along Broadway the night before.

The forecast was for showers on Tuesday morning, but after a few light sprinkles, our Giant heroes were deluged mostly with 50 tons of confetti and shredded paper that rained down on the donated floats. The bells at Trinity Church rang for 45 minutes — mostly drowned out by the cheering crowds — and Trinity’s rector Reverend Dr. James H. Cooper, clad in a Giants cap, offered his blessing over the procession.

The Giants’ parade was the city’s first ticker tape celebration since the Yankees won the 2000 World Series, and the first ever for a Super Bowl championship. Most significantly, this morning’s parade was the first to take place in the Financial District since September 11.

Super Bowl XLII MVP Eli Manning and the Vince Lombardi trophy:

Of course, although the event is called a “ticker tape” parade, financial institutions no longer use ticker tape to record stock prices, as the ticker tape machines became obsolete in the 1960s. The streams of papers are more likely these days to be of the bathroom tissue variety, unfurled from oversized institutional rolls swiped from the restrooms of office buildings lining Broadway.

On the topic of defunct technology, it seems that Polaroid has quietly halted production of its signature instant cameras and film. Does that mean that years from now, kids will have no understanding of what it means to “shake it like a Polaroid picture“? Or will the phrase continue to retain relevance a la “You spin me right round, baby, right round like a record, baby, right round, round, round“?

Tags: Canyon of Heroes, Financial District, Giants, parade, Super Bowl

Thanksgiving Day Parade 2007

I took a break from cooking this morning to catch the tail end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade along Central Park West. So strange to be able to step outside my apartment without a jacket in late-November.

The unseasonable warmth did not last: by evening’s end, the temperatures had plummeted 30 degrees — a chill against which even our bellies full of Thanksgiving turkey could not insulate us.

Tags: balloons, crowds, parade, Thanksgiving

Scenes from Providence

On the way back to New York City, we spent a few hours in Providence, since none of us knew when we would be driving this route again any time soon. All those years to and from the Cape, and I don’t think we ever made this stop.

We hit downtown just as the Veteran’s Day celebrations were winding down; the day’s highlight was the dedication of the newly constructed World War II Monument for which several news vans were on site. The $1.3 million memorial features a main columned rotunda, flanked by two angled walls of granite, engraved with the names of the 2,562 Rhode Islanders who died while serving during World War II.

A parade, which began at the Rhode Island State House, had preceded the dedication ceremony but by late afternoon, most of the crowds had already dispersed.

We came across this random bit of risd detritus in an abandoned shopping cart:

The First Baptist Church in America, founded by Providence-founder Roger Williams; his National Memorial is located just a few blocks north. The 80-foot square church, completed in the Spring of 1775, was the largest building project in New England at that time. (The 185-foot steeple was added after completion.)  Its construction benefited greatly from the British closing of Boston’s ports in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, which freed up many shipwrights and carpenters who eventually made their way to Providence in search of alternate work. Capacity of the meeting house was 1,200 people, then equal to one third the entire population of Providence.

Views of architect/planner William D. Warner’s $270 million 10-year waterfront project, which began as a 1982 study into reconnecting Providence with its lost waterfronts. Warner’s “Waterplace Park” (with its dozen low, graceful, arched river-spanning bridges), the nearby $435 million 1.3-million-square-foot Providence Place shopping and entertainment complex, and the NBC television series ”Providence” (er, seriously?) all have been credited with giving this city of 175,000 a new cachet.

Tags: parade, Providence, Rhode Island, river, skyline