This week in Philly history: Philly hosts America’s first Thanksgiving Day parade

The annual Thanksgiving Day parade celebrated its 105th edition Thursday, proudly counted in local advertisements as the oldest such event in American history.

News reports, public relations materials, and Wikipedia entries mark the parade’s inception as taking place in Center City on Nov. 25, 1920.

Despite it being a more low-key affair than what we recognize today, the Gimbel Brothers department store gets the nod for the original concept.

Gimbels Has It! author Michael J. Lisicky explains it this way.

“In 1920, it was a much more low-key event,” said Lisicky, who obtained Gimbels corporate documents for his book research. “And it was more almost for the employees, to rouse them up before the Christmas season.”

Ellis Gimbel’s vision was to marry children’s love of Santa Claus with his own love of moving merchandise at his store at Eighth and Market Streets.

The building would also play a key role in the culmination of the parade: A red-clad firefighter would climb a ladder to the store’s eighth-floor window and step into the “Toy Palace,” signifying the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season.

But for the parade’s first iteration, only about 50 people participated, spread out over 15 cars, according to Gimbels Has It! Santa Claus rode in the last car, which was lavishly decorated with rolls of crepe paper.

“It was a very personal event,” Lisicky added. “It wasn’t along those grander lines.”

In 1924, however, department stores in two other major cities grabbed headlines. The J.L. Hudson Co. in Detroit and R.H. Macy & Co. in New York famously started their own parades, adding circus-like spectacles that attracted large crowds and national attention.

And Gimbels took notice.

So in 1925, Gimbels touted the parade and boasted about its superior Santa Claus production, in advertisements splashed across multiple urban and suburban newspapers, including The Inquirer, weeks before the holiday.

The ads claimed: “There has never been anything like it.”

“There are people who don’t necessarily want to accept 1920 as being the first year of the Gimbels parade because it was so modest,” Lisicky said. “Philadelphia is America’s oldest organized Thanksgiving Day parade. I don’t think it’s even worth a debate.”

The Gimbel family eventually sold its empire, which had ballooned to 36 stores nationwide, and by 1986 all locations were slated for closure.

The parade, and its heritage, is all that remains. It’s now known as the 6ABC Dunkin’ Thanksgiving Day Parade, but it is still a cornerstone of the city’s annual holiday celebrations.

“It was a hit from day one,” Lee Arnold, Historical Society of Pennsylvania library director, wrote in an email, “and started a string of copycat parades (Are you listening New York City?).”