User:Oksuzanne/sandbox

Albert Einstein and his wife did not have a ticker-tape parade upon their arrival by boat in New York City on April 2, 1921.

Ticker-tape parades are unique New York City parades. Those honored proceed from the Battery, the southern tip of Manhattan, up Broadway (known as the "Canyon of Heroes") to City Hall. As note in the Alliance for Downtown New York's website "hundreds of thousand of spectators crowd sidewalks and look down from skyscraper windows. They cheer and shout and toss confetti in a shower that becomes a blizzard of shredded paper falling on the motorcade below." The "confetti" and "shredded paper" was originally the paper ticker tape thrown from windows of companies along Broadway that had ticker-tape machines.

Kenneth Jackson's "The Encyclopedia of New York City," (Yale University Press, 2nd edition, 2010), which has the definitive list of ticker-tape parades, does not mention a ticker-tape parade for Einstein. In The New York Times, April 3, 1921, "Prof. Einstein here, Explains Relativity," reported: "The crowds were packed deeply along the Battery wall, waving Jewish flags of white with two blue bars, wearing buttons with Zionist inscriptions, and cheering themselves hoarse as the police host John F. Hyland drew near. Dozens of automobiles were parked near the landing and when the welcoming committee and the visitors had entered them they started uptown to the Hotel Commodore, preceded by a police escort. They turned into Second Avenue, where the sidewalks were lined nearly all the way uptown with thousands who waved hands and handkerchiefs and shouted welcome to the visitors." The picture of Einstein standing in the car that begins Chapter 13 of the biography has no ticker tape.

Walter Isaacson's biography "Einstein," (Simon & Schuster, 2009) describes the Einsteins' welcome in Chapter 13, "The Wandering Zionist," on p. 293-294: "The Einsteins and Weizmanns intended to head directly to the Hotel Commodore in Midtown. Instead, their motorcade wound through the Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side late into the evening.'Every car had its horn, and every horn was put in action,'Weizmann recalled. 'We reached the Commodore at about 11:30, tired, hungry, thirsty and completely dazed." Isaacson's footnote cites quotes and descriptions from April 3, 1921 stories in newspapers, including The New York Times.

In the article in The Atlantic, December 2009 issue, "How Einstein Divided America's Jews," Isaacson repeats the initial welcome New Yorkers gave the Einsteins, tracking what he wrote in his biography of the scientist. There clearly was a motorcade and cheering crowds, but not along Broadway and not any ticker tape.

The strange "fact" of the Einstein ticker-tape parade was added by an IP address in late October 2009. This misinformation was apparently relied on by Laura Fitzpatrick in a Time magazine article, November 6, 2009, "A Brief History of Ticker-Tape Parades." In the July 20, 2015 "A Ticker-Tape Parade for Team U.S.A.," Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town erroneously mentions a ticker-tape parade for Einstein, along with other notables' parades along "the stretch of Broadway known as the Canyon of Heroes.