U.S. women’s soccer team will get ticker-tape parade in New York

Get out the shredders! New York City has announced it will hold a ticker-tape parade in lower Manhattan to honor the U.S. women’s national soccer team victory at the FIFA Women’s World Cup.

Mayor Bill de Blasio delivered the news Tuesday evening, a day after the Manhattan borough president, Gale Brewer, issued a public call for a parade. In a letter to De Blasio, Brewer said that New York, despite its history of celebrating sports champions with ticker-tape parades, had never held such an event for a women’s team.

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FOR THE RECORD

8:18 p.m.: An earlier version of this story said De Blasio called for the parade hours after the Manhattan borough president did so. Actually, it was a day later.

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Brewer said the team’s 5-2 victory over Japan on Sunday “set an amazing example for athletes across our great nation. I can think of no better way to honor these amazing athletes than by hosting a ticker-tape parade in the Canyon of Heroes in lower Manhattan.”

The Canyon of Heroes is the name given to the route that runs up Broadway through the financial district to City Hall. The first ticker-tape parade was held there in 1886, for the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, according to the Alliance for Downtown New York.

Theodore Roosevelt got a parade there in 1910 after returning from an African safari. Pilot Amelia Earhart got two parades, one in 1928 and one in 1932.

Kings, queens, sports heroes, astronauts and countless heads of state have been feted along the route. In 1981, the Americans who had been held hostage for 444 days in Iran had a parade.

The last such parade was in 2012, to honor the New York Giants’ Super Bowl XLVI victory. The crowd for that event was estimated at 500,000 to 1 million.

Thousands of people packed a rally in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday to cheer the team and its star midfielder, Carli Lloyd, who scored three goals Sunday.

“We’re going to have to bring it home four years from now, another World Cup,” Lloyd said to cheers from the crowd.

If TV viewership of the game is any indication, New York’s parade crowd will be in the many tens of thousands. FIFI said 25.4 million viewers tuned into the match, making it the most-watched soccer game ever in the United States.

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