Creative History

  The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade took place exactly one-hundred years ago in 1924.  And just like today’s annual holiday spectacle, this first incarnation of the iconic Thanksgiving Day Parade, marched straight down 34th Street in midtown Manhattan and ended outside of Macy’s flagship department store at Herald Square.     However, unlike today’s parade that is full of marching bands, celebrities, broadway dancers and larger than life inflatable balloons and ornate floats--that first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was composed entirely of Macy’s employees….and Santa of course!  But even the big guy in the red suit played a slightly different role in that first parade than he does today.  Rather than riding through midtown at the head of  a reindeer driven sleigh and waving at the throngs of onlookers who line the parade route, the Santa Claus of 1924 sat in a stately throne, was crowned “King of the Kiddies” by his elves (which sounds vaguely...

  Located roughly three-hundred miles northwest of New York City, between the state’s capital of Albany and the Canadian capital city of Ottawa; nestled among picturesque pine trees in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains, the tiny village of Lake Placid was an unlikely place to host the 1932 Winter Olympics.   Taking place during the darkest days of the Great Depression in the early 1930’s, in an era before television, the III Olympic Winter Games (as they were officially called) were unlikely to popularize winter sports in particular, and the Olympic Games in general in the United States at a time when most Americans were struggling day to day simply to feed themselves and their families.   But thanks to the tireless efforts, and stubbornness, of one man; to the intervention of a future American President, unique and modern innovations with regards to the Olympic Games themselves (many which have stayed with us to this day) and to a group of talented, courage...