NEW YORK — New York City’s West Indian Day Parade kicks off Monday with thousands of people dancing and marching through Brooklyn in one of the world’s largest celebrations of Caribbean culture.
The annual Labor Day event, now in its 57th year, turns the county’s Eastern Parkway into a kaleidoscope of feather-covered costumes and colorful flags as participants parade down the street alongside speaker-filled floats blasting soca and reggae music.
The parade routinely draws large crowds, which line the nearly 2-mile (3.2-kilometer) route from Crown Heights to the Brooklyn Museum. It is also a popular destination for local politicians, many of whom have West Indian heritage or represent members of the city’s large Caribbean community.
According to organizers, the event has its roots in the more traditional pre-Lenten carnival celebrations started by a Trinidadian immigrant in Manhattan about a century ago. The festivities were moved to the warmer time of the year in the 1940s.
Brooklyn, where hundreds of thousands of Caribbean immigrants and their descendants have settled, began hosting the parade in the 1960s.
The Labor Day parade is now the culmination of days of carnival events in the city, including a steel drum band competition and J’Ouvert, a separate street party on Monday morning commemorating freedom from slavery.
