Yankees Victory Parade

Friday morning, bright and early, I got myself on the #4 downtown subway train and got off at Wall Street and Broadway station to do some drawing of the Yankees Victory Parade! For those of you who don't know, the Yankees are the American baseball team from the Bronx who won the 2009 World Series. The ticker tape parade honoring them is a NY tradition - as the heroes ride up Broadway, also called the 'canyon of heroes', the offices near Wall Street dump ticker tape down on them like confetti. Ticker tape is the old paper ribbon on which stock prices were written. The computer has made it obsolete, but there is still plenty of shredded documentation that can be dumped on the Yankee players as they ride up Broadway on floats! The crowd waited for three hours to see the players - as you can see from the drawing above, they got a bit rowdy! A taxi-cab found it's way down Broadway about two hours before the parade started, only to be jeered at and pelted with rolls of toilet paper!

Finally the Yankees started coming up the street - this is Hideki Matsui - the Most Valuable Player of the series, and the fans went wild! He was very reserved in the face of all this adulation, smiling and waving to the crowd with style.

The best part of the Yankees - also known as 'the Bronx Bombers' - are the fans. You've got to love the crowd...one little boy managed to hurl a roll of toilet paper clear across Broadway and the crowd cheered so loudly for him that his Dad held him up high to receive the adulation! Great spirit there!

As quickly as the players came by on the floats, they were gone. As they went up Broadway, they left a ton of shredded papers and fan adrenaline in their wake. Another little boy asked to see my drawings, and then asked me, somewhat incredulously, "so you just come here to draw and have fun?" I smiled and said, "yeah, isn't it great?" We both agreed that it was. Happy day.