Not even the pandemic could stop this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which traveled just one block instead of two miles, with only 130 masked balloon handlers instead of the usual 2,000.
But this wasn’t the city’s first masked Thanksgiving. Before the Macy’s parade became the centerpiece of the holiday in New York, there was a tradition known as Ragamuffin Day. From the late 1800s to the mid-20th century, children would dress up in masks and costumes, take to the streets, and beg for goodies like candy, pennies, and apples. According to the New York Public Library, the tradition dates back to around 1870—several years after President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in an effort to build unity after the Civil War, suddenly granting kids a day off from school.
They wore papier-mâché masks of animals and politicians, sailor and cowboy outfits, and beggar costumes consisting of oversized rags, which inspired the name “Ragamuffin Day.” If dressing up like poor people sounds problematic, there were also masks that “made fun of people of other nations ‘with greatly exaggerated facial peculiarities.’” Basically, imagine a more racist version of today’s Halloween.
Ragamuffin Day took hold in cities across the country including LA and Chicago. According to an 1897 article in The Los Angeles Times, Thanksgiving was "the busiest time of the year for the manufacturers of and dealers in masks and false faces.” But by 1930, New York’s adults had had enough. Superintendent of Schools William O’Shea distributed a memo to district superintendents and principals stating that "many citizens complain that on Thanksgiving Day they are annoyed by children dressed as ragamuffins, who beg for money and gifts." Yet the tradition persisted in the outer boroughs for several more decades. (In present-day Bay Ridge, there’s an annual children’s Ragamuffin Parade in October, and a street named Ragamuffin Way.)
By the 1950s, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—which began in 1924, when costumed employees marched with animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo—had become the city’s dominant Thanksgiving spectacle (especially after it was featured in 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street) and Ragamuffin Day had been subsumed by Halloween.
“Thanksgiving Maskers,” ca. 1910, Image via the Library of Congress, Bain Collection
Around town…
-Employees at Trader Joe’s and Roberta’s (which recently closed after several workers contracted Covid) are speaking out about unsafe work conditions: “I’m just concerned I’m gonna go to work and get infected and this is a job I have to do to keep my health insurance.” (Gothamist)
-The closure of spay-and-neuter clinics for months last spring has led to a cat-astrophic explosion in the city’s feline population: “We cannot adopt our way out of this problem.” (The City)
-The Christmas show will go on in midtown department store windows and Dyker Heights this year: “The windows are a time to say: ‘Hey, we’re New York. We’re here. And we’re big.’” (NY Times, Brooklyn Paper)
-Reconsidering the legacy of Mayor David Dinkins, who died last week at 93: “Most of all, his very incrementalism and cool cautiousness, the things that probably made him more acceptable to white voters in the first place, led to an image of inaction as one news event after another began to blow up around him.” (NYMag)