First Labor Day parade: Union Square protest was a 'crossroads' for NYC workers

NEW YORK − On a recent morning, New Yorkers passed through Manhattan's Union Square, feeling a cool breeze on their skin as they made transit connections and weaved between vendors. Walking down the square's gently sloping granite stair steps, they entered a space that's been sacred to U.S. labor organizing.

On the first Monday in September 1882, the first Labor Day parade was held at Union Square − which gets its name from being the meeting point of major thoroughfares. That first parade was such a success it caused more people across the U.S. 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 any place that’s been more significant to labor organizing in the United States than Union Square," said Andrew Berman, executive director of Village Preservation, which works to protect the history of neighborhoods surrounding Union Square.

More so 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 significant the first Labor Day parade was in New York City, a major player in global business, she said. The day of the first parade in 1882, it was like the workers "owned the streets," she said.

"New York is a city of money, it's a city in which financial interests dominate, it's the head of finance for the world," Trasciatti told USA TODAY. "To have a day where working class people are filling the streets together, that's really a powerful statement."

Where is Union Square?

Union Square is dozens of blocks south of Central Park, but the plaza known for workers' rights is also quite centrally located, sitting just north of what's considered lower Manhattan. Of the 12 numbered avenues running north-south through Manhattan, Union Square falls between 5th Avenue and 4th Avenue, which unites with another major street, Broadway, running diagonally out of the square's southeast and northwest corners. The park is bordered by 14th Street to the south and 17th Street to the north.

"Union Square was such a crossroads, in 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 transport connections, and it's this open space that has room for workers to gather."

On a recent Friday morning, Nadia Arnett sat on a stair step facing 14th Street, enjoying a breakfast pastry. She said it's always been important for workers to get the pay they deserve, especially Black Americans, who for hundreds of years were enslaved, 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 in repose while playing music from a wireless speaker. Marrero, 63, said he was a porter who worked overnight cleaning Manhattan restaurants his whole life before getting injured and undergoing arm and abdominal surgeries. Now, he said, he's unable to work. At Union Square, he's able to focus on the positive, he said.

"I like seeing people live and move about, I play positive music so hopefully people that walk by will feel it," Marrero said. "I'm just focusing on being grateful, which it's taken me my whole life to realize," he said, adding he's celebrating Labor Day at a barbeque with friends.

A large open space, Union Square has paved walkways and some green space, while the southern portion is dominated by a massive brick plaza. There are few places to sit in the large bottom portion of the park, except on a handful of stair steps.

On Friday, as commuters hurried on their way to the N, Q and L subways lines, other New Yorkers ruffled through pharmacy shopping bags, while some begged for money or collected aluminum cans to exchange for cash at recycling centers. More than 100 people gathered in the space, but it wasn't crowded because of the square's expansiveness.

That same architecture allowed about 10,000 marchers and more than 20,000 spectators to gather during 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 bottom half of Union Square, it's an open public space that just melts right into the streets in a distinctive way."

1800s Union Square was working class

In 1882, there were more places for working class people to gather around Union Square, like in automat restaurants, a precursor to fast food, where a customer could put coins into a slot to purchase a meal, said Joshua Freeman, an emeritus history professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

"The idea that you'd find your colleagues by going to a cafeteria off of Union Square is very quaint now because you can just reach them on Facebook or something," Freeman told USA TODAY. "We don't quite have physical equivalents to these kinds of centers that we once did."

There were also cheap cinemas and affordable department stores for the working class along 14th Street, which was referred to as the "Poor Man's Fifth Avenue," Berman said.

Union Square's role as a major center working class hub lent itself to worker solidarity. Different labor unions came together to advocate for important rights like an 8-hour workday, an end to child labor and equal pay for women, said Vapnek.

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

For long after the first Labor Day parade, Union Square and its surrounding neighborhoods remained "the center of leftist and progressive movements and labor organizing in New York City," which was "probably the most impactful in the country," said Berman, noting the Communist Party of America was headquartered off of Union Square on 13th Street for much of the 20th century before moving to 23rd Street.

Throughout the entire 20th century and much of the 21st, Union Square continued to be a site of mass protests and organizing, Phillips-Fein said, pointing to New York's main 9/11 memorial, demonstrations opposing wars in the Middle East, and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

What was the first Labor Day parade like?

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

"You've got to remember, it was not on a weekend. So for workers to not go to work, it was a risky thing," Freeman said.

Held in early September, the workers marching that day were making a statement together in warm, end-of-summer weather, and they had brass bands filling the music with air, said Trasciatti. Thousands of unionized men representing different trades like carpentry and construction were organized behind banners representing their labor unions, she said.

"Places like Union Square where working people gathered, and can still gather, to hear speakers and to march, that's where you feel solidarity," Trasciatti said. "It's where these abstract words like solidarity are directly experienced."

The worker unity and pride on display influenced the way the day was marked later in the U.S., Freeman said.

“It was considered such a big success that it established the idea that it should be a workers’ holiday," Freeman said.

NYC Labor Day parade 2024

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

This year, the New York City Labor Day Parade will be held on Saturday, Sept. 7 and the theme is "All workers, many voices, one fight."

"In many ways it's a very American theme, like 'E pluribus unum,' which means, 'out of many, one," Trasciatti said.