Marshall Fields, Macy's, and the State Street Christmas Parade

When I was a little kid, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade always felt a bit like watching something out of another culture. I had never seen a Macy's before, as they had no stores in the Midwest at the time, but I knew that it was in New York City and so I imagined that it must be a thousand times bigger, more fashionable, and more glamorous than the Marshall Field's department store that I would visit with my family over the holidays. I did not watch much television as a kid and my family did not have cable, so the abundance of licensed characters and B-list celebrities intrigued me. I had never been to a parade with giant balloons like the ones in the Macy's parade. I found it fascinating.

I never knew that we had our own similar, albeit much smaller, Thanksgiving parade here in Chicago until I was in college. I was home on break, and my younger sister, who was in an Irish step dancing troop, was scheduled to perform in the parade. So my mom and I went down, despite the freezing temperatures, and watched her march past, wearing my dad's enormous white knit sweater from the Aran islands on top of her green Irish dance dress. There were, I learned, balloons in this parade, too, much like the balloons in the Macy's parade that I had seen on TV. To be honest, I found the parade to be a bit lackluster. State Street looked dingy, and the parade seemed to be struggling to fill the breadth of the road. The crowds gathered along the sidewalk were sparse, and it seemed as if more people were there just trying to get from once place to another than were there to watch the show. The parade was sponsored by Marshall Field's (as evidenced by the Marshall Field's "jingle elves" who were a constant presence), and I surmised that this must have been their response to what Macy's was doing in New York City.

Because nothing says "Christmas is here!" like this.

It turns out that, even if the parades did wind up being relatively similar, they were established for different reasons--the Macy's parade in order to give outlet to the celebratory spirit of Americans who were prospering, and the Marshall Field's parade in order to cheer up Americans who were struggling.

The first Macy's parade took place in 1924, and was mostly staffed by Macy's employees. Many of the people working at Macy's were recent immigrants or first generation Americans, and, excited about their new identity as Americans, wanted to find a way to celebrate the all-American holiday of Thanksgiving with a parade similar to those they had experienced in their native countries. The parade featured floats, costumes, and animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo, and was such a success that the store decided they would do it every year. Animal shaped balloons replaced the live animals in 1927 with the debut of a Felix the Cat balloon made by the Goodyear tire company, and they went on to become a parade feature. Apparently, back in the day, at the end of the parade they would just release the balloons into the sky. The first year they did this, the balloons immediately burst, which I suppose was sort of depressing, so the next year they reengineered them with safety valves so that they would continue to float through the sky for a few days before becoming deflated and falling to the ground. They had address labels on them, and the people who found them would return them to Macy's in exchange for a free gift.

I was thinking that the balloons must have been much smaller in the early days, but apparently they were letting balloons of this size float loose around the city. Madness! (Photo: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, 1934.)

The parade in Chicago was actually initially intended to celebrate Christmas, not Thanksgiving, and was originally celebrated after Thanksgiving was over, with its first occurrence on December 7, 1934. At this point, the Great Depression had been lagging on for five years. The economy was a mess and people's spirits were low (sound familiar, anyone?). So, they decided to hold a Christmas parade down State Street to get people in the Christmas mood. Santa Claus led the parade with a sleigh full of items from various State Street merchants, and there were floats and people marching. In spite of sub-zero temperatures, the parade was a great success and led to the best season for holiday sales since 1927. In the next year, 1935, the city did not have any money to hold the parade but since it had been such a success in the year before, they found out a way to do it anyhow. They couldn't afford expensive floats, so instead they used the streetcars that still ran down State Street to pull the entertainers. Since then, the parade has gone on in various iterations, moving from State Street to Michigan Avenue for a time, then coming back to State Street again and changing dates to be on Thanksgiving rather than sometime in early December. Although the parade I saw was part of a brief period of Marshall Field's sponsorship, the parade was not always sponsored by Marshall Field's in the same way that the Macy's parade has always been associated with Macy's. It was founded by the State Street association, and has been sponsored at various times by Brachs, McDonalds, and Marshall Fields.

State Street Parade, sometime in the 1960s

Now, of course, Macy's is a familiar entity to Chicagoans, as the company bought Marshall Field's and turned the iconic State Street store from a Marshall Field's to a Macy's in 2006. It was a transition that I certainly found difficult, and I think it was hard on other Chicagoans, as well. In the same way that Macy's and Bloomingdale's had once been these inaccessible East Coast shopping meccas, Marshall Field's was unique to Chicago. Now, though, it's all the same everywhere you go. We've lost some of those differences.