Each year, at eleven in the morning on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Veteran's Day parade begins at Madison Square and heads up Fifth Avenue.
Why 11:00 on 11/11?
Ninety-one years ago, at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the armistice, the official cessation of hostilities signed six hours earlier, went into effect, ending World War I, the war to end all wars and the war remembered by more memorials in New York than any other war before or since.
A year later, President Woodrow Wilson created Armistice Day, which was actually celebrated on the 12th. It was later moved to the 11th. In 1938, the day became a legal holiday, but was still known as Armistice Day until 1954 when it became Veteran's Day under Eisenhower.
Follow the links for a survey of World War I memorials in New York and for a history of the armistice as well as the primary document of the actual terms. The armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed the following year, became such symbols of national disgrace in Germany that when Hitler captured France in 1940, he forced the French to sign an armistice in the same railway carriage where the Germans had conceded defeat twenty-two years earlier.
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