Garfield and Snoopy fi nally found themselves a better flight path.
After 90 years of struggling down Broadway and, briefly, Seventh Avenue, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade’s balloons will have a gracious and spacious venue to strut and soar next year: Sixth Avenue from Central Park South to Herald Square.
What’s anachronistically called Avenue of the Americas has been transformed into New York’s Avenue of the 21st Century, even if Times Square boosters bury their heads in their bike-laned, tourist-trampled asphalt.
“Snoozy,” “lifeless” and “empty,” the Times Square Alliance sneered of the new parade route. They must be reading 20-year-old guidebooks that regarded Sixth as a soul-less corporate corridor redeemed only by Radio City Music Hall.
Dig out from under the farmers, guys! Midtown Sixth Avenue bears zero resemblance to what it was as recently as 1995, when the New York Post moved to 1211 Sixth. The once-dull boulevard has blossomed into a throbbing, cosmopolitan drag that millions of parade-goers and TV viewers will be enthralled to meet.
Its sidewalks bustle at all hours. Its once reviled office-building plazas work much better than they did in the past. Thanks to the avenue’s open sight lines, they’re made for parade-watching.
No longer strictly home to banks and brokerages, Sixth has morphed into a media nexus, home to the Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal, Pearson, HBO and the SNY sports-network studio.
Its stores are dazzlingly diverse — button shops and bridal boutiques, a Japanese bookstore, the NHL store and Brooks Brothers, which moved from Fifth Avenue. Del Frisco’s steakhouse will soon be joined by a new STK.
Midtown’s finest new office tower, 1 Bryant Park, presides at 42nd Street, where it’s home to a better restaurant, Aureole, than any in Times Square. The great park for which it’s named commands two glorious blocks of greenery.
There are architecture and art to spare: Eero Saarinen’s imposing “Black Rock,” Thomas Hart Benton’s murals in the AXA building lobby, and the International Center of Photography.
Times Square, meanwhile, has consigned itself to tourist-bleacher status ever since Broadway was closed for Transportation boss Janette Sadik-Khan’s hideous “plazas.”
The biggest whiners over the parade relocation are Times Square hotel managers, who embraced the miserable plazas but now stand to lose parade-day revenue owing to the need to rebuild them, the city’s nominal reason for moving the route.
Of course, Sixth Avenue’s hotels — the Ritz-Carlton, New York Hilton, Warwick and Marriott Residence Inn — aren’t likely to complain. As with all urban transformations, some win, some lose.
Moving the bands and the floats to Sixth will make the city as a whole the biggest winner of all.
