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    • Remembering the protest in New York City
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    Remembering the protest in New York City

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    NEW YORK − On a recent morning, New Yorkers walked through Manhattan’s Union Square, feeling a cool breeze on their skin as they hopped between sidewalks and weaved between vendors. They descended the square’s gently sloping granite steps and entered a space sacred to American labor organizing.

    On the first Monday in September 1882, the first Labor Day parade was held in Union Square, which takes its name from the fact that it was a meeting point of major thoroughfares. That first parade was such a success that more people in the U.S. began to pay attention to workers’ rights, historians say, and in 1894, President Grover Cleveland made Labor Day a national holiday.

    “I don’t think there’s a place that’s been more important to union organizing in the United States than Union Square,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of Village Preservation, an organization that works to protect the history of the neighborhoods around Union Square.

    More than now, the Manhattan communities around Union Square were populated by working-class immigrants, said Mary Anne Trasciatti, director of the Labor Studies program at Hofstra University on Long Island. It’s also telling that the first Labor Day parade was in New York City, a major player in global trade, she said. On the day of the first parade in 1882, it was as if workers “owned the streets,” she said.

    “New York is a city of money, it’s a city where financial interests dominate, it’s the head of finance for the world,” Trasciatti told USA TODAY. “A day when working-class people come together to fill the streets is a really powerful statement.”

    Where is Union Square located?

    Union Square is a dozen blocks south of Central Park, but the square known for its workers’ rights is also fairly central, just north of what is considered Lower Manhattan. Of the 12 numbered avenues that run north-south through Manhattan, Union Square lies between 5th and 4th Avenues, which meet another major street, Broadway, running diagonally from the southeast and northwest corners of the square. The park is bounded by 14th Street to the south and 17th Street to the north.

    “Union Square was such a crossroads, between east and west, uptown and downtown,” said Lara Vapnek, a history professor at St. John’s University in Queens. “There’s also all these transportation connections, and it’s this open space where workers come together.”

    On a recent Friday morning, Nadia Arnett sat on a stairway facing 14th Street, enjoying a breakfast pastry. She said it has always been important that workers are paid the wages they deserve, especially African Americans, who were enslaved for hundreds of years without any income.

    “That’s the point of Labor Day in this country: You’re supposed to get paid for your work,” Arnett, 46, told USA TODAY.

    Not far away, Johnny Marrero sat quietly, playing music through a wireless speaker. Marrero, 63, said he was a doorman who worked nights cleaning restaurants in Manhattan his whole life before he was injured and underwent surgery on his arm and abdomen. Now, he said, he can no longer work. In Union Square, he can focus on the positive, he said.

    “I like to see people living and moving, I play positive music, so hopefully people walking by feel it,” Marrero said. “I just focus on gratitude, which it’s taken me my whole life to realize,” he said, adding that he’s celebrating Labor Day with a barbecue with friends.

    Union Square is a large open space with paved walkways and some greenery, while the southern portion is dominated by a huge brick plaza. There are few places to sit in the large lower portion of the park, except for a handful of steps.

    On Friday, as commuters rushed to the N, Q and L subway lines, other New Yorkers rummaged through pharmacy bags, while some begged for money or collected cans to exchange for cash at recycling centers. More than 100 people packed the space, but it was not crowded because of the plaza’s vastness.

    That same architecture allowed about 10,000 marchers and more than 20,000 spectators to gather for the first Labor Day parade, said Kimberly Phillips-Fein, a history professor at Columbia University.

    “You can just get a lot more people into Union Square,” Phillips-Fein said. “The lower half of Union Square is a public space that transitions into the streets in a distinctive way.”

    Union Square in the 19th century was a working class neighborhood

    By 1882, there were more places for the working class to gather around Union Square, such as restaurants with vending machines, a precursor to fast food, where customers could insert coins into a slot to buy a meal, said Joshua Freeman, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

    “The idea that you can find your coworkers by going to a cafeteria in Union Square is very outdated now, because you can just reach them through Facebook or something,” Freeman told USA TODAY. “We don’t really have physical equivalents of these kinds of centers that we once had.”

    There were also cheap movie theaters and affordable department stores for the working class along 14th Street, which was sometimes called the “Poor Man’s Fifth Avenue,” Berman said.

    Union Square’s role as a major working-class center lent itself to working-class solidarity, with several labor unions coming together to advocate for important rights such as an eight-hour workday, an end to child labor and equal pay for women, Vapnek said.

    “People don’t necessarily realize that in the 1880s, there were really no labor laws,” Vapnek said. “There was no legislation limiting the number of hours people could work, so it’s really up to the workers to do it.”

    Long after the first Labor Day Parade, Union Square and its surrounding neighborhoods remained “the center of left-wing and progressive movements and labor organizing in New York City,” which was “probably the most influential center in the country,” Berman said. He noted that the Communist Party of America had its headquarters in Union Square, at 13th Street, for much of the 20th century before moving to 23rd Street.

    Throughout the 20th century and much of the 21st, Union Square remained a site of mass protest and organizing, Phillips-Fein said, citing New York’s main 9/11 memorial, anti-war demonstrations in the Middle East and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

    What did the first Labor Day parade look like?

    Because the first Labor Day parade was held before the national holiday was declared, about 10,000 workers walked off the job to participate, Freeman said.

    “You have to remember it wasn’t the weekend. So it was risky for employees not to go to work,” Freeman said.

    The workers who marched that day were making a statement in the warm, summer weather in early September, and they had brass bands filling the air with music, Trasciatti said. Thousands of union members representing various trades, such as carpentry and construction, were organized behind banners representing their unions, she said.

    “Places like Union Square where working people came together, and can still come together, to hear speakers and to march, there’s a sense of solidarity,” Trasciatti said. “There, these abstract words like solidarity are experienced directly.”

    The unity and pride of the working class that emerged influenced the way the day was later commemorated in the United States, Freeman said.

    “It was considered such a success that the idea arose that it should become a holiday for the workers,” Freeman said.

    NYC Labor Day Parade 2024

    In recent history, the New York City Labor Day Parade has marched down 5th Avenue without stopping at Union Square. But the Central Labor Council, which was renamed the Central Labor Union in 1882, is still the main organizer of the event, said Trasciatti, who will be joining the Triangle Fire Memorial, a group formed to raise awareness of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 garment workers, mostly young women, in Manhattan after factory owners locked fire escapes.

    This year, the New York City Labor Day Parade will be held on Saturday, September 7, and the theme is “All Workers, Many Voices, One Fight.”

    “It’s a very American theme in many ways, like ‘E pluribus unum,’ which means ‘out of many, one,’” Trasciatti said.

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