A Blend of Innovation and Tradition

The 36th Annual Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks

When you’re responsible for putting together America’s biggest birthday party, you have to keep it fresh and offer new opportunities to ooh and ahh each year. At the same time, with a holiday like the Fourth of July, the epitome of patriotism, you have to keep some traditions alive from year to year as well.

That balance of new ideas and tradition is precisely what makes the annual Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks show so moving for the millions of guests watching live and on television each year. This year, Amy Kule, the show’s executive producer, and her team have added innovative, new elements to the celebration.

“We started with two very new programs to make things a little bit different, a little bit current,” says Kule.

For the first, they reached out to the public and asked for America’s help with the playlist for the fireworks, in a Facebook contest called, naturally, America’s Mixtape. They also created The Star-Spangled Sing-Off, a contest to find a talented up-andcomer to sing the national anthem for the show.

There are also a few new ways to listen to the musical score for the fireworks this year. As usual, 1010 WINS AM will broadcast the playlist, but this year Fresh 102.7 FM will simulcast as well. In addition, the first ever Macy’s Fourth of July app is available for download to smartphones. If you don’t have a radio with you, you can listen to the music through the app that way, too. “It’s a really beautiful, integrated, resourceful and informational app,” says Kule. “It’s absolutely perfect information for anyone trying to traverse the city and find the best viewing spots.”

One tradition that won’t change a bit this year is the annual hot dog day — the Sunday before the show, all the teams and individuals and dozens of people working on the show get together at the fireworks pier to celebrate for a moment. “We eat really great food together before we disperse and do our individual jobs and push really comes to shove,” she says.

A few weeks after the show, everyone reconvenes at the Macy’s Parade Studio in New Jersey for another barbecue. “We slap each other on the back and trade war stories and talk about what’s going to be bigger and better for next year,” Kule explains.

This year, viewers can look forward to another spectacular show from Pyro Spectaculars by Souza, one of the largest pyrotechnics companies in the country. They’ll bring back favorites like the Golden Mile, but there are also some new effects planned. “Shapes are always the most exciting element,” says Kule. “We get so many letters after the fireworks each year, and people mention the shapes more than anything else.” This year there are 30 different shapes, including leaves, fans, flowers and a new addition that Kule is particularly excited about, “an octopus,” she says.

This year, the show will be set up on four barges placed along the Hudson from 18th Street to 43rd Street. And, in keeping with tradition, it will be the largest fireworks display in the country. “It’s about 80 times bigger than the average show in the nation,” Kule explains. Those shows usually feature about 500 shells, the explosives that send fireworks up into the sky. The Macy’s display features 40,000.

“The show itself is designed in the creative minds of Macy’s and Souza,” she says. “All on computers, initially.” Then, in the days leading up to the show, it’s all about manpower. It takes about two weeks to fully equip the barges and get the show in place for the Fourth. “It’s a laborious task,” says Kule.

There are two computers on each barge to which the 40,000 different mortar set-ups are connected. The Souza team loads fireworks into each one, and then wires them to the right computer, which on the night of the show acts as an electronic match. The computer sends a charge and the mortars fire the shell. When the shell travels to its prescribed height in the sky, each firework explodes. The height it reaches and the angle it has been fired from allows for an incredible amount of layering in the sky.

Using computers rather than human technicians to fire the mortars has vastly changed what is possible to do in a show, says Gary Souza, one of the owners of Pyro Spectaculars. “One of the reasons that we started to work with Macy’s was that they were one of the first companies to start working with electronically firing fireworks, probably around 15 years ago,” he says. The computer fires at intervals of 1/30th of a second and there are highly choreographed moments in the show where 3,000 bursts go off in a three-second period. “That couldn’t have been done 20–25 years ago,” says Souza. “We didn’t have the ability to make them dance or move. It’s almost like waving them across the sky at multiple angles.”

The show moved to the Hudson River a few years ago, after many years on the East River, and while Kule says it is too early to determine next year’s location, she did say that changing the venue from time to time was part of Macy’s plan. “We will move around as we always have,” she says. “This show belongs to the people of the city and the people of America.”

It’s those people Kule looks to while all other eyes are trained on the sky. “When the very first explosion goes off and the first element goes up into the sky, instead of keeping my eyes focused on the sky, I turn around and watch the faces,” she says. “It’s the culmination of a year’s work for a lot of people, and it means a whole lot to me.”