- On Sunday, the US Women’s National Soccer Team became world champions once again after beating the Netherlands 2-0.
- The team will be riding down New York City’s Broadway on July 10 in their second ticker-tape parade.
- I walked up and down Broadway to see how the city was preparing for the massive crowds.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
New York is once again celebrating the victorious US Women’s National Soccer Team with a time-honored Big Apple tradition: the ticker-tape parade.
This year’s parade will take place on July 10, exactly four years after the last one. That 2015 parade was held after their last FIFA Women’s World Cup win. This year, the team defeated the Netherlands 2-0, marking their fourth World Cup victory.
The team will make its way down the “Canyon of Heroes,” a half-mile stretch up Broadway in downtown Manhattan. The exact origin of the term is unknown, but according to the Downtown Alliance, an organization that coordinates the parades, the name became popular as “skyscrapers replaced low buildings and turned the narrow downtown streets into stone canyons.”
Ticker-tape parades are so called because of the one-inch-wide strips of paper (ticker-tape, used to record stock quotes via telegraph) thrown out of financial office building windows. Although there won’t be any actual ticker-tape raining down, there will be “shredded recycled paper” courtesy of Kansas Paper Recycling, according to the Wall Street Journal.
I took a stroll down the famous street to get a sense of how New York is preparing for the massive crowds.
Here's what it looked like the day before the celebrations.
The parade begins at 11 a.m. and travels along Broadway from Battery Place to Chambers Street.
I began my survey at the parade's eventual starting point, Battery Place, where the National Museum of the American Indian is.
I found the famous Charging Bull sculpture near Wall Street, but only barely — it was overrun with tourists.
Broadway was strewn with NYPD barricades ahead of the parade.
All trash cans along Broadway were locked up for safety.
As I walked along Broadway, I read every plaque embedded in the sidewalk, commemorating past parades. This one, at Bowling Green, introduces the Canyon of Heroes.
The first ticker-tape parade was held when France gave the US the Statue of Liberty in 1886. Even though I'd walked over these plaques hundreds of times over the years, I'd missed quite a few of them, like this one. No else on the street seemed to notice them, perhaps because it was rush hour.
Some important people have gone down this street, including the Apollo 11 astronauts, John F. Kennedy, Jesse Owens, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Charles de Gaulle, Nelson Mandela, and dozens of others.
The most recent parade was held for the last US women's national soccer team when they won the 2015 World Cup. The 2019 parade will be held precisely four years later.
The parade passes by some beautiful New York landmarks, like the Woolworth Building, which was the tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1912.
A few blocks down is St. Paul's Chapel, built in 1766, with One World Trade Center towering in the distance.
Five blocks after that is Trinity Church, which was built in the 1840s.
A man was selling shirts commemorating the world champions a full 24 hours before the parade.
The parade even passes right by the Business Insider headquarters at One Liberty Plaza.
The parade officially halts at Broadway and Chambers Street, but it'll likely end when the winning team makes it to City Hall.
At the end of the last parade in 2015, a closing ceremony was held at the steps of City Hall, just off Broadway and Murray Street. The team was given the key to city and showered with confetti. The same is likely to happen this year.
