Pasadena, California
AA-2026-D43D2B
On the image
Somewhere in Hawthorne, California, a committee spent the better part of a year arguing over whether the horse should look more like a horse or more like a chrysanthemum, and the compromise sits here in full bloom: a carriage-and-team built entirely of flower petals, mounted on a float that took a crew of volunteers all night to finish before dawn judging. The orange, the brick gateposts, the whole citrus-and-Californiana theme behind it belong to an era when a city's civic pride was measured in how many thousand blossoms it could glue to chicken wire before New Year's morning.
The orange card reading '2nd Prize' is doing a lot of quiet work in this picture. Somebody at the Tournament of Roses judged Hawthorne's entry against dozens of rivals and decided it was very good, just not quite good enough, which is its own small American tragedy repeated annually since 1890. The float still rolled the full parade route regardless, because in Pasadena even the runners-up get their mile of Colorado Boulevard.
Behind the float, spectators in overcoats stand along the route with the flat patience of people who have done this every January of their lives. The mountains in the distance don't care who won.
The historian's note
This float was entered in the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade, an annual New Year's Day event held in Pasadena, California since 1890 and already a major national broadcast spectacle by the 1950s. Participating cities and civic organizations, such as Hawthorne, California, competed for prizes judged on floral design, craftsmanship, and theme execution, with floats built by volunteer committees over many months and covered entirely in living flowers and organic material as required by parade rules.
The orange '2nd Prize' placard identifies this as an award-winning but not top-ranked entry in its category. The horse-and-carriage motif with a citrus-fruit backdrop reflects the parade's long tradition of California agricultural and civic themes, an era when Southern California cities used the Rose Parade as a stage for regional boosterism and orange industry pride before postwar suburban development displaced most local citrus groves.
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Hawthorne's Second-Prize Flower Float, Pasadena Rose Parade, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-D43D2B. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hawthorne-s-second-prize-flower-float-pasadena-rose-parade-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026D43D2B,
title = {Hawthorne's Second-Prize Flower Float, Pasadena Rose Parade, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-D43D2B},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hawthorne-s-second-prize-flower-float-pasadena-rose-parade-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Hawthorne's Second-Prize Flower Float, Pasadena Rose Parade, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-D43D2B UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hawthorne-s-second-prize-flower-float-pasadena-rose-parade-1950s ER -
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