Diaspora

 

By Christine Papas

Photo Credit: Dianel Miller

 

After the Hellenic flag raising at Bowling Green yesterday, members of the AHEPA EMPIRE District 6 and Manhattan-based AHEPA Delphi Chapter #25, ( the largest District and Chapter, respectively,  in AHEPA's national and international domain) reenacted the original Hellenic Independence Day Parade that took place on April 6, 1893  (and also in 1894, etc.) in the downtown Manhattan Broadway-City Hall area.

 

On that day 300 Hellenes marched to Broadway by way of Chambers Street to City Hall. Then Mayor Thomas Gilroy allowed the Hellenic Flag to be flown over City Hall with a flag also raised by the Hellenes over nearby Reiner Hall at 475 Pearl St. (the original building has been demolished and and The AHEPA DISTRICT 6 Governor, Louis Katsos, participated in the construction of the current maximum security prison now at that location).  Solon J. Vlastos, the President of the Brotherhood of Athena (the first Hellenic fraternal society in New York) , who also  later in 1894 founded the Atlantis newspaper, helped make the arrangements in a letter to the mayor he wrote that “on the Acropolis of Athens, above the noble ruins of the Parthenon, every Fourth of July, the Stars and Stripes float as a remembrance of the debt of Greece to America.”

 

 

This was the very beginning of the grand Greek Independence Day Parade which later became an annual event along Fifth Avenue and the largest Hellenic Independence Parade in the world. The press reported that it was a great day for the Greeks of New York.” It was reported in the April 6 editions of the New York Times, the New York Herald, the New York Daily Tribute, the New York World, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

 

 

 

 

Note: in 1891 about 450 members of the Brotherhood of Athens, the first Hellenic fraternity in New York, raised funds to establish the Church of the Holy Trinity.