Paraders pass the Brooklyn Museum Photo: Fordmadoxfraud / Wikimedia
Brooklyn’s annual Labor Day West Indian parade is New York’s biggest parade, and possibly the largest single Carnival celebration in the world, is on today, with more than 2 million participants and spectators expected to line Eastern Parkway, with many more watching from windows along the route.
The parade features thousands of wildly colorful costumes, with each association choosing its own themes and colors. Music blares from floats and steel bands all along the route. The areas along the sides of Eastern Parkway become a festival of food, crafts and souvenirs for the day.
The parade, whose leadership has usually been from Trinidad and Tobago, draws participants from all over the Caribbean as well as Caribbean people living in New York. It’s been held in Brooklyn since the early 1960s. Before that, it grew from indoor Carnival celebrations in some of Harlem’s great ballrooms, starting in the 1930s.
