One Summer: America, 1927

stretched infrastructure. When the colossal Graybar Building, the world’s largest office building, opened in early 1927 at 420 Lexington Avenue, it brought 12,000 office workers to one site. A single block in Manhattan now could easily contain 50,000 people. All this high-rise density made New York the most breathtakingly packed and challenging city in the world in which to live and move about, but it also provided the most exhilarating and perfect backdrop for a ticker-tape parade, and it was now about to have the biggest one ever seen.
    On Monday 13 June, Charles Lindbergh flew himself in a borrowed navy aeroplane to Mitchel Field on Long Island, where he was immediately transferred to a waiting amphibious plane for the short trip onward to the city. He could not possibly be prepared – no human could – for what awaited him. What he saw now as he came into New York Harbor was perhaps the most extraordinary sight ever accorded an individual: an entire city, the greatest in the world, standing ready to receive him.
    The harbour was a mosaic of boats; beyond, from the bottom of Manhattan to Central Park, people thronged every street and filledevery rooftop and office window. No one can possibly say how many people witnessed the parade. Most estimates put the number at between four and five million. It may well have been the biggest crowd ever assembled anywhere to pay tribute to a single person.
    Lindbergh was met in the harbour by the mayoral yacht (a gift to the city from Rodman Wanamaker) for the transfer to the Battery and the beginning of his parade. A buffet lunch had been laid on, but it turned out that the newspapermen and photographers who had got there first had eaten every bit of it, so Lindbergh had to face the festivities on an empty stomach.
    An estimated 300,000 people were waiting for him at Battery Park, where he climbed into an open-topped Packard and perched on the back seat beside Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was dressed, a little anachronistically, in a top hat. Lindbergh, as always, stayed bare-headed. They proceeded up Broadway through a blizzard of ticker tape and drifting confetti so dense that at times Lindbergh and Walker were all but invisible to those lining the route. The scale of the occasion was without precedent. After the armistice parade in 1918, street sweepers cleared 155 tons of debris. For the Lindbergh parade, it was 1,800 tons. Some spectators in their excitement emptied whole wastebaskets out of their office windows, without always considering whether they might contain heavy objects. Among the items collected the next day were phone books and business directories and other bulky detritus that had been dropped or joyously flung from lofty windows and miraculously hurt no one.
    One person standing anonymously among the onlookers was a young woman named Gertrude Ederle, who may have qualified as the most forgotten person in America. The daughter of German immigrants – her father owned a butcher’s shop on Amsterdam Avenue – Ederle was the finest swimmer America had ever produced, of either sex. In a single day in 1922 she broke six national records. She was also as strong as an ox and capable of swimming vast distances. In August 1926, she not only became the firstwoman to swim the English Channel, but did it faster than any man ever had. This feat so impressed and excited her fellow Americans that she, too, was given a great ticker-tape parade and was for a while so famous that crowds followed her everywhere.
    At the height of her brief celebrity, Ederle received commercial offers worth $900,000, but her manager believed she was worth more than that and wouldn’t let her sign any of them. Unfortunately, the world simultaneously noticed that when out of the water Trudie Ederle was not terribly interesting or attractive. She was a little stocky and not over-blessed with charisma. She was also very hard of hearing, which made her seem irritable and impatient during press interviews. Just after her arrival home, another woman, a Danish-born American named Mille Gade, swam the Channel, too, which made Ederle’s achievement suddenly seem slightly ordinary. The world speedily lost interest in Gertrude Ederle, and indeed in Channel swimming generally. In the end, Ederle made just $19,793 in personal-appearance fees. By the time of Lindbergh’s parade she was earning $50 a week as a swimming instructor and was able to walk through the city without attracting notice. When she was