Macy’s and the 100-Year Tradition of the Thanksgiving Parade

In ‘This Week in History,’ we witness the rise of Macy’s department store and how the New York City employees created a lasting American tradition.

A giant Eddie Cantor balloon is followed by the Big Bad Wolf, in Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade on Nov. 22, 1934 in New York City. FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Macy’s made its historic move 20 blocks uptown to New York City’s Herald Square in 1902. By this time, Rowland H. Macy, who had founded R.H. Macy & Co. as a dry goods store in 1858, had been dead for 25 years. Macy’s was one of the country’s first department stores. In fact, all of America’s earliest department stores had begun as dry goods stores (Macy called his products “fancy goods”). The move to Herald Square was costly: $4.8 million. That was half of the company’s annual sales.

Macy's Herald Square building, in 1907. Public Domain