NYC Pride March
The NYC Pride March is an annual event celebrating the LGBTQ community in New York City. The largest pride parade in North America and among the largest pride events in the world, the NYC Pride March attracts tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June.[4][5] The parade route through Lower Manhattan traverses south on Fifth Avenue, through Greenwich Village, passing the Stonewall National Monument,[6] site of the June 1969 riots that launched the modern movement for LGBTQ+ rights.
NYC Pride March
Annually, last Sunday in June
New York City, U.S.
June 28, 1970, as part of Christopher Street Liberation Day
June 30, 2024
Heritage of Pride, since 1984
A central component of NYC Pride observances, the March occurs on the last Sunday in June.[7] An estimated four million attended the parade in 2019,[8] coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, which drew five million visitors to Manhattan on Pride weekend.[9]
Broadcast[edit]
For many years the march was only available locally to Time Warner Cable customers, via its NY1 news channel. In 2017 WABC-TV broadcast the NYC LGBT Pride March live for the first time regionally, and made the stream available to all parts of the globe where such content is accessible.[31][32] WABC-TV continues to broadcast the first three hours of each years march (which has had an actual run time over nine hours in 2017 and 2018). Both the 2017 and 2018 broadcasts were Emmy nominated programs. In 2022, the WABC-TV broadcast was also available via streaming from ABC News Live and Hulu.
Size[edit]
The first march, in 1970, was front-page news in The New York Times reporting the march extended for about fifteen city blocks.[24] The march had thousands of participants with organizers "who said variously 3,000 and 5,000 and even 20,000."[24] The variance could be due, in part, that although the march started with over a dozen homosexual and feminist contingents, parade spectators were encouraged to join the procession.[24] Currently, Heritage of Pride requires preregistration of marchers, and sets up barricades along the entire route discouraging the practice.[39]
Although estimating crowd size is an imprecise science, the NYC March is consistently considered the largest Pride parade in the U.S., with 2.1 million people in 2015, and 2.5 million in 2016.[40] In 2018, attendance was estimated around two million.[41] In 2019, as part of Stonewall 50 – WorldPride NYC, up to five million people took part over the final weekend of the celebrations,[42][43] with an estimated four million in attendance at the parade.[8][44] The twelve-hour parade included 150,000 pre-registered participants among 695 groups.[45] It was the largest parade of any kind in the city's history and four times as large as the annual Times Square Ball on New Year's Eve.[46]