Rose Parade Float, Pasadena Tournament of Roses, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Rose Parade Float, Pasadena Tournament of Roses, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Rose Parade Float, Pasadena Tournament of Roses, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-C31DC6

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Sometime in the 1950s, a team of volunteers spent the final sleepless nights before New Year's Day pressing hundreds of thousands of flowers, seed pods, and dried botanicals onto a steel armature, because the rules of the Pasadena Tournament of Roses required that every visible surface be covered entirely in organic material. The result towering here — a pair of seahorses fashioned from yellow mums pulling a gilded chariot, framed by rust-red floral vines arcing overhead — represents the kind of ambition that made perfect sense when you were twelve months deep in the planning of it.

Behind the railing, the crowd in winter coats watches with the particular expression people adopt when something large and slightly surreal rolls past them on a public street. The San Gabriel Mountains visible in the background place this squarely on the Colorado Boulevard route, which by the fifties had become the American civic spectacle most likely to be described by a city official as "wholesome."

The float would last exactly one more day before the blooms began their inevitable retreat. The committee that built it considered this a reasonable return on investment.

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