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Perhaps one of the United States of America's most important annual festivities, The Tournament of Roses Parade is the 114-year-old traditional parade held on New Year's Day in Pasadena, California. Rooted in tradition, this parade is broadcast on the big-three networks, watched by upwards of one million spectators on the parade route, and seen by hundreds of millions more on television. It is traditionally followed by the Tournament's other event, the Rose Bowl college football game.
First staged in 1890 by members of Pasadena's Valley Hunt Club, the Tournament of Roses has quite evidently undergone major change.
Many of the members of the Valley Hunt Club were former residents of the American east and midwest. They wished to showcase their new California home's mild winter weather. At a club meeting, Professor Charles F. Holder announced, "In New York, people are buried in the snow. Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let's hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise."
And so the Club decided to organize their first New Year's Day parade. Horse-drawn carriages covered in flowers, followed by foot races, polo matches, and a game of tug-of-war on the town lot attracted a crowd of 2000 to the event. Upon seeing the scores of flowers on display, the Professor decided to suggest the name "Tournament of Roses".
Over the next few founding years, marching bands and motorized floats were added. By 1895, the event was too large for the Valley Hunt Club to handle, hence the Tournament of Roses Association was formed. By the eleventh annual Tournament (1900), the town lot on which the activities were held was re-named Tournament Park. Activities soon included ostrich races, bronco busting demonstrations, and an odd novelty race between a camel and an elephant. (The elephant won the race.) Soon, reviewing stands were built along the parade route, and newspapers in eastern seaboard cities started to take notice of the event.
The Tournament of Roses Parade has followed the same route for many decades. It starts by going north on South Orange Grove Boulevard, beginning at Ellis Street. It proceeds east on List of Past Grand Marshals of the Tournament of Roses Parade
Each year, a pageant is held to find out which Pasadena-area girls have the honor of being crowned Queen of the Tournament, or in substitution, one of the members of her "Royal Court". The winners then ride on a float in the parade, and carry out duties in promotion of the Tournament, mainly during its duration and prelude.
Originally, floats were created solely by volunteers from sponsoring communities. Currently, most are built by professional float building companies, and take nearly a year to construct. This is not the be-all-and-end-all of the Tournament, as some communities and organizational sponsors still rely on volunteers.
Shortly after each year's parade is over, the parade sponsors and participating communities start to plan their floats for the following year. Then a chassis is built; it consists of a framework of steel and chicken wire.
The chassis is then "cocooned" in the next process; it is sprayed with a polyvinyl material. This cocoon is painted with the colors of the flowers to be applied to the float.
Every square inch of the exposed surface of a float entered in the Rose Parade strictly must be covered with flowers or other natural materials. These other decorative applicants include bark, seed and leaves.
In the days following Christmas, these natural additions to the float are applied by volunteers. Many volunteers end each day covered in glue and petals. Delicate flowers are even set up in individual vials of water, set into the float one-by-one.
Underneath many of the modern floats are computer-controlled robotic mechanisms, to animate the floats.
While many distinct changes have taken place with the Festival's floats, including computer-aided movement and professional float building, the floats have kept true to the event's title and heritage, by using real, fresh flowers.
The sheer amount of flowers required by a single float in its decoration is actually more than the average American florist will use in five years of operation.
More recent attendance figure are followed by the predicted attendances in parenthesis. Most predictions are conducted by The Tournament of Roses and the Pasadena Police Department. Actual figures are by the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.
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