Planning a Parade in Secret

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Defensive end Michael Strahan and quarterback Eli Manning during the Giants' ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes on Feb. 5, 2008.

The New England Patriots may be slight favorites going into the Super Bowl, but Joe Timpone has spent all week acting as if the Giants have already won it. It isn't just forceful optimism—he's actually a Jets fan. It is his job.

Timpone is the senior vice president for operations at the Alliance for Downtown New York, which maintains the stretch of Broadway known as the Canyon of Heroes. And whether or not the Giants earn a ticker-tape parade there next week, Timpone has been getting ready since the moment they booked their spot in the Super Bowl.

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Eli Manning in the Canyon of Heroes during the Super Bowl XLII victory parade in February 2008.

"Uh oh, here we go again," Timpone remembered thinking after the Giants beat the San Francisco 49ers. "We love it, but the other part of it means a lot of preparation."

And a lot of secrets. Few people were comfortable talking about the celebration this week, as if planning it might somehow cause Eli Manning to throw a critical interception or poke holes in the Giants' defense 600 miles away. No one wants to be a jinx.

The Office of the Mayor, which organizes the parade, declined to comment without denying that the wheels were already in motion. The city also held a logistics meeting on Friday afternoon for a possible parade Tuesday, according to a person in attendance.

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Giants officials were also reluctant to discuss it, although defensive end Chris Canty did tell fans this week to "get ready for a parade on Tuesday." Of course, the team has very little to do with the planning. All the Giants are really required to do is win the Super Bowl and show up on time.

When they beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII four years ago, no one even mentioned parade plans until the flight home from Arizona. Once they arrived, the city notified them of the day's schedule. They turned up at Battery Park, mounted the floats, and the rest was confetti up Broadway.

The route this time around would be nearly identical, running from Battery Park to roughly Chambers Street at the northern end of City Hall Park. But not everyone is thrilled with the idea. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a well-known Jets fan, has argued that the parade route is entirely in the wrong state. Since the Giants play and train in New Jersey, he believes Jersey has a rightful claim on the celebration.

The sentiment is not a new one. After the Giants 1987 Super Bowl victory, Mayor Ed Koch famously declared that he would not want them honored with a parade in his town. After all, they had spurned the city by moving across the Hudson from the Bronx in 1976, making them a "foreign team," in the mayor's eyes.

"Let them have a parade in Moonachie," Koch said at the time.

New Yorkers, along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, do not hold the same grudge. According to a poll released Friday by Quinnipiac University, 84% of them would prefer a parade in the city.

If the Giants do win, it would be the third Canyon of Heroes celebration for a sports team in four years after the Giants' success in 2008 and the Yankees' World Series victory in 2009. So for many agencies, organizing it is only a matter of dusting off the plans from the last parade and tweaking them as necessary.

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Jim Long, a spokesman for the Fire Department, explained that the procedure is "pretty much cookie-cutter" at this point. Ticker-tape parades have been held in New York for dignitaries and conquering athletes for over a century. During the Yankees' dynasty years from 1996 to 2000, they were nearly annual occurrences.

"You know how many championships we have under our belt?" said Long, who agreed to speak as long as the football gods were not listening. "You know how many times we've been to the rodeo? We're familiar with the process."

So are the people in buildings along the hallowed three-quarter mile of Broadway. At the law firm of Kenyon & Kenyon, which occupies 1 Broadway across the street from Battery Park, ticker-tape parade parties have taken on a life of their own.

Gwen Bey, the firm's chief administrative officer, has organized the last two and is quietly picking out the menu for the possible festivities next week. She said the firm would be expecting between 850 and 950 guests in the building—employees, friends, clients and even a few former Giants who have already received invitations.

Kenyon & Kenyon did the same with the Yankees in 2009 and cannot wait to party for any local bunch proceeding past their windows.

"We like to see any New York team," she said.

Timpone, a veteran of more than a dozen parades in his time with the Downtown Alliance and 31 years at the Department of Sanitation, has seen it all before. As the resident experts on that stretch of Broadway, he and the Alliance are aware of every pothole, construction project and trash can along the parade route, information that Timpone passes along to the Department of Transportation and the Department of Buildings.

The Alliance's division of 50 street cleaners then deploys for a curb-to-curb cleaning of Broadway for the morning of the parade, Timpone said, to remove "anything that can be used as missiles or anything that people could stand on and put themselves in danger as well as other people." He also has to remind people in the Broadway buildings not to throw heavier objects like toilet paper or phone books.

"A lot of security issues have changed," Timpone said. "A lot of the windows are now locked shut and they don't allow people to open them. They don't allow people out on the ledges anymore or on the roof, like in the old days."

For those who do have windows that open, the Alliance has free confetti by the bale. Timpone has already compiled a list of the buildings that will claim a share of one ton of recycled paper shreddings, provided by a materials company in Brooklyn. (Although it is only a small fraction of the total paper that the Department of Sanitation can expect to clean up—after the 2008 parade, it dealt with some 36 tons.)

On Tuesday morning, if all goes according to plan, an Alliance truck will make its massive confetti run at the crack of dawn, delivering huge bundles of paper before the roads are closed. But if the unthinkable happens and the Giants lose, then the confetti will stay in Brooklyn and next week will simply revert to business as usual on lower Broadway.

"The city's great about going on with their normal responsibilities. Everybody just forgets it," Timpone said. "Just listen to the game on Sunday and you'll know what you're doing on Monday."

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A17
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