New York Easter Parade Live Stream & TV Schedule

NEW YORK - March 31, 2018 - PRLog -- The New York City Easter Parade returns once again on Sunday 1^st April, bringing large crowds out onto the city's iconic Fifth Avenue for one of the city's biggest annual parades.

New York Easter Parade

Starting at 10am, the parade will proceed as usual down 5^th Avenue, from 49^th to 57^th Street. The parade route will be lined with huge crowds gathering to watch the spectacle, and will generally be wrapped up by 4pm in the afternoon. There will be large gatherings of spectators all along the route, but the most congested areas will be around St Patricks' Cathedral, which will also be holding the usual range of Easter services:

St Patrick's cathedral New York Easter Masses will be held at 7:00, 8:00, 8:45 and 10:15 am. Please nore that tickets are required for these earlier services. There are then further masses at 12 Noon, 1:00pm 4:00pm in Spanish, and 5:30pm.

The parade will once again be covered live on local TV online, find the live stream and TV schedule details here:

https://www.myworldevents.com/parade/new-york-easter.html

Easter Parade History

From the 1880s through the 1950s, New York's Easter parade was one of the main cultural expressions of Easter in the United States. It was one of the fundamental ways that Easter was identified and celebrated. The seeds of the parade were sown in New York's highly ornamented churches.

By the 1880s, the Easter parade had become a vast spectacle of fashion and religious observance, famous in New York and around the country. It was an after-church cultural event for the well-to-do - decked out in new and fashionable clothing, they would stroll from their own church to others to see the impressive flowers (and to be seen by their fellow strollers). People from the poorer and middle classes would observe the parade to learn the latest trends in fashion.

In 1933, American songwriter Irving Berlin wrote the music for a revue on Broadway called As Thousands Cheer. It included his song "Easter Parade", which he had been working on for fifteen years, and in which he had finally captured the essence of the parade. Both the song and the revue were tremendously popular. The song became a standard, and fifteen years later was the basis for the film Easter Parade.

By the mid-20th century, the parade's religious aspects had faded, and it was mostly seen as a demonstration of American prosperity. The year 1946 saw a resurgence of stunts, pranks, and extravagant behavior. In 1947, the State Department's Voice of America did a radio broadcast of the Fifth Avenue parade to the Soviet Union, the idea being to show the economic inferiority of the Soviet system. In 1955, The Saturday Evening Post stated that New York's springtime pageant was only an incidental celebration of a religious holiday, and had become a reflection of the fact that, in America, a person was as good as the clothes and other goods he or she was able to buy. The parade itself had become an unstructured, boundless event, with no apparent beginning, ending, organization, or purpose. Some think that had begun in the 1870s as a parade of refinement and religious display had become merely an ostentatious frolic.

Today, New York's Easter parade is enjoyed both by families in Sunday best and people and pets in outlandish costumes, often paying homage to the parade's former glory by, to cite a typical example, wearing garish hats with live birds in flower-adorned cages. New Yorkers of all ages and types participate and it's popular with the festive set.