‘Homecoming of Heroes' ticker-tape parade honoring post-9/11 war veterans coming to NYC next summer
A ticker-tape parade honoring war combat veterans who served in post-9/11 wars is coming to lower Manhattan next summer, according to the mayor's office.
Dubbed the 'Homecoming of Heroes' and slated for July 6, 2026, the parade down the 'Canyon of Heroes' from the Battery to City Hall formally recognizes more than 2.9 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan following the September 11 terror attacks.
The ticker-tape parade, set to be the first of its kind in a major US city, will offer 'a powerful opportunity to highlight the contributions that service members continue to make,' Mayor Eric Adams said during a fleet week event Thursday.
'It would pay tribute to the extraordinary service, sacrifice and resilience of the post 9/11 combat veterans who did so much to protect our city and our nation in the wake of the deadliest attack on our homeland since Pearl Harbor,' he added.
More than 7,000 American troops died in the wars and contingency operations, and another 53,436 were injured, according to New York City Department of Veterans' Services James Hendon.
Another 31,177 veterans died by suicide, he said.
'We're doing what we can to remember and never forget our people and their loved ones,' Hendon said.
The last ticker-tape parade was held in October for the New York Liberty, which celebrated the WNBA team's first championship win.
While actual ticker-tape from 'ticker' machines was originally used as confetti in the early days of the parades, the Downtown Alliance now provides bags of crinkled packing paper for the event.
Roughly 2,000 pounds of the paper – costing the alliance about $5,000 – was dropped on the seafoam-green party, which drew an estimated 80,000 attendees to lower Manhattan.
Scores of bags of confetti were doled out the day before the parade to about two dozen buildings along Broadway that requested them.
If the 'Homecoming of Heroes' is anything like the Downtown Alliance's other ticker-tape parades, the combat veterans will be memorialized in stone with one of over 200 of the alliance's granite sidewalk plaques along the 'Canyon of Heroes' sometime after the parade.
The plaques are designed by Pentagram, who also designed One World Trade Center's engraved cornerstone, and are manufactured by a New York City-based architect.
'The whole process of ordering, lettering, shipping and installation takes about two to three months total,' a Downtown Alliance rep told The Post.
'This will be more than just a parade,' Adams said Thursday. 'It will serve as a symbol of belonging, of closure and of collective pride.
'It will be a sign that our veterans and their families matter to us – not just during the wartime they fight, but in the peacetime they help achieve.
'It marks a small seed of our gratitude and our commitment to them: the seed that allows us all to water the tree of liberty so that we can sit under its shade.'
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McQuivey, whose review of the research finds that more than a third of Americans wish they had more children than they currently have, and that 'an astonishing 88% agree that 'having children is one of the most important things I have done.'' Clearly, not everyone wants to or can become a parent. Reasons for not having kids are deeply personal and vary widely. While some may indeed want to sit leisurely on a beach, others, like Mother Teresa, prove that parents don't corner the market on selflessness. Many young adults feel ambivalent because their financial situations are too tenuous to buy a home or support a family, and still others wanted to parent, but infertility or life circumstances interfered. Catherine Rossi's poignant essay 'Not in the (Motherhood) Club,' describes her 20s full of work, a boyfriend and energy that somehow shifted in her 30s. 'With the seven-year guy long gone, I struggled to find another,' she writes, and then 'was hit full force in the face,' as her 30s became 40s, that 'there was a club.' Motherhood. And she would never be in it, feeling ostracized as everyone's lives began and continued to revolve around their children. No one should be stereotyped as selfish or feel ostracized for not having children, but a societal narrative that 'all parents are miserable' is not only untrue, but dissuades young adults from participating in what many find the most rewarding part of life. George Bailey. What a life. First the longed for dream of travel and Europe postponed, actually demolished, to salvage the family business and keep Bedford Falls from falling prey to Mr. Potter's evil machinations. Then marriage to Mary followed by multiple children — further imploding dreams of architecture, explorations and making it big. No wonder George questions, at a desperate juncture, whether his life is worth anything in Frank Capra's film classic 'It's a Wonderful Life,' as all his selflessness seems for naught. One of today's influencers might call George miserable, living in hell. It takes a hapless angel named Clarence to give George a vision of what his family and friends' lives would be like without his altruism (spoiler alert: pretty terrible). The movie ends with George surrounded by a grateful wife and thankful kids, relatives and a household full of friends. Mr. Potter, with money and power to make every wish come true, comes off as the truly miserable one compared to George's wonderful life. Maybe family-first, we-before-me selflessness offers its own angelic perspective during the desperate junctures of marriage and child-rearing, removing us from near-sighted annoyances and heartaches to give us the long view that sacrifices are worth it, and that hard times can bring out the best in us. Writer-surgeon Richard Selzer (1928-2016) was particularly adept at taking miserable medical situations and reframing them through the ennobling actions of a selfless spouse. In Selzer's essay 'Tube Feeding,' a husband tenderly ministers to a wife with an inoperable brain tumor, unable to eat. He devotedly carries out his daily duty when the feeding tube suddenly dislodges, so he nervously scrambles to reattach the tube, a nauseating process. Not wanting his wife to sense his distress, the husband discreetly hurries to a bathroom where she hears him throwing up. In another Selzer essay, he must cut a small nerve to remove the tumor in a woman's cheek — leaving the young wife with a twisted, clownish mouth. As Selzer encounters his patient and her husband back in her hospital room, he asks himself, 'Who are they? ... He and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at each other so generously, greedily?' 'Will my mouth always be like this?' she asks, and Selzer replies yes, 'because the nerve was cut.' The wife remains silent, but the husband smiles and says, 'I like it ... it is kind of cute.' 'All at once I know who he is,' Selzer continues. 'I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.' This article is the fourth of a series on the future of marriage in America.
