Maja Hitij/Getty ImagesThe US Women’s National Team will be honored today with a ticker tape parade after its World Cup soccer win over the Netherlands 2-0 on Sunday, according to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Here’s what you need to know about the parade:
- What to expect: The parade will start at 9:30 a.m. ET and head down the Canyon of Heroes in lower Manhattan.
- About last celebration: The last ticker tape parade in New York, in July 2015, also honored the US women’s soccer team after its defeat of Japan 5-2.
- The first ticker tape parade was in 1886: New York has hosted 206 marches up Broadway from the Battery to City Hall since 1886, according to the Alliance for Downtown New York, a commercial advocacy, research, and information group. Each parade is marked with a granite strip along the parade route.
- What is ticker tape anyway? The ticker tape machine was invented in 1867 to record telegraphed stock trades for brokerage firms located in Lower Manhattan, the city’s financial district. The machine spit out inch-wide ribbons of paper printed with the trades. Office workers learned that handfuls of ticker tape thrown into the air created a dramatic effect. (Note: As the stock exchange upgraded to using electronic devices, ticker tape became harder to come by and parade attendees began using shredded paper.)
- There will be a lot of clean up: The parades generate literally tons of paper and other debris, the NYC Department of Sanitation says. For example, the 336 men and women assigned parade cleanup collected 34.06 tons of confetti and other trash after the 2012 parade in honor of the New York Giants Super Bowl XLVI win.