For the 82nd time, the Columbus Day Parade will take over Fifth Avenue on Monday, Oct. 12, stepping off at 11:30 a.m. and marching from 44th Street up to 72nd Street through the heart of Midtown. Organizers with the Columbus Citizens Foundation, which has run the event for decades, expect more than 100 participating groups and several marching bands, making it one of the largest single-day spectacles on the city's calendar. It is free, it is open to anyone who shows up along the route, and it is, by the foundation's own description, the largest celebration of Italian American heritage in the United States.
The parade is the centerpiece of a three-day Columbus Weekend that begins well before the first band strikes up. On Saturday, Oct. 10, the foundation holds its Columbus Celebration Gala at Cipriani 55 Wall Street. On Sunday, Oct. 11, a wreath-laying ceremony at Columbus Circle honors ancestors and the uniformed men and women of New York City. On Monday morning, before the parade, a Columbus Day Mass is celebrated at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Only then does the march up Fifth Avenue begin.
This year's theme is "250 Years of Italian Contribution to America," a nod to the semiquincentennial of the United States and to the generations of Italian immigrants and their descendants who shaped the country. It is a framing the foundation has leaned into deliberately: the parade, in its telling, is less about the historical Columbus than about what the people who followed him across the Atlantic built once they arrived.
The grand marshal for 2026 is Ray Dalio, the founder and mentor of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, as well as a philanthropist and bestselling author of books on principles and economics. Dalio will be represented at the parade by his son, Matt Dalio, founder of Endless and CEO of Endless Studios. Also honored this year are Ambassador Leandro Rizzuto and Dr. Evelyn Granieri.
The grand marshal role has a long and eclectic lineage. Past honorees have included Maria Bartiromo, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, racing legend Mario Andretti, baseball's Joe DiMaggio, and the actress Sophia Loren, a roster that says something about how the foundation has positioned the parade: as a showcase for Italian American achievement across wildly different fields.
The organization behind it all, the Columbus Citizens Foundation, was founded in 1944 by Judge S. Samuel Di Falco and Generoso Pope, the influential publisher of Il Progresso Italo-Americano, to memorialize and foster the contributions Italian immigrants brought to the United States. Its headquarters, a stately building on East 69th Street with marble accents and arched windows, is a fixture of the Upper East Side; it has even served as a filming location for Hollywood productions. The foundation's primary philanthropic work is awarding scholarships to students of Italian heritage, and its membership has historically numbered in the hundreds of men and women from law, medicine, government, business, education, and the arts.
The parade itself traces its roots to 1929, when Italian American heritage was first celebrated on Fifth Avenue, and took on its more formalized, foundation-run shape beginning in 1944. Over the decades it has grown into an event that draws tens of thousands of participants and, in big years, crowds approaching a million spectators. It has also served as a civic barometer. In 2001, it was the first major parade up Fifth Avenue after the September 11 attacks, and in 2021 it returned as the first big parade coming out of the pandemic, with the theme "Resilience, Rebuild, Reunite." Marian Pardo of the Columbus Citizens Foundation said at the time that the organization was proud to have been first in both instances.
This year's parade arrives amid a very different kind of civic friction. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, sworn in on Jan. 1, 2026, is not expected to attend. The mayor recently posted a video on social media tracing the journey of Italian Americans in the United States, but the video did not mention Christopher Columbus. Council Member Joan Ariola, in a statement, said she was proud to have been part of what she described as a chorus of Italian American voices that encouraged the mayor to stay away, referencing a resurfaced 2020 image of Mamdani giving a Columbus statue the middle finger while calling for its removal. On the campaign trail, Mamdani had said he would skip some parades. The governor is expected to attend Monday's festivities.
The tension over Columbus statues has been simmering in the city for years. A Brooklyn heritage group, the Preserving Italian Heritage Coalition, plans to unveil a new Columbus statue this fall on private property at the John Hughes Club in Dyker Heights, sidestepping the city review process that would apply to a public monument. The Columbus Heritage Coalition argues that such monuments became symbols of Italian American identity precisely because immigrants once used public statues to assert cultural pride in the face of discrimination and violence.
None of that will stop the parade. On Monday, Fifth Avenue will fill with marching bands, floats, and the customary parade of Italian luxury cars, Maseratis and Lamborghinis among them, revving their way up Midtown as they have for generations. For anyone who simply wants to watch, the route runs from 44th Street to 72nd Street, and the whole thing is free. Eyewitness News anchors Sandra Bookman and Mike Marza, along with Kemberly Richardson and Anthony Carlo, will carry live coverage on Channel 7 and streaming platforms beginning at noon.
For a city that has spent much of the past year arguing about what Columbus Day should mean, the parade remains what it has always been: a few hours when Fifth Avenue belongs to the people who came, and to the people who came after them.