Every morning at half past six, a small boy is supposed to get out of bed and let the chickens out. He does not want to. So one evening he scatters feed by the coop, runs a rope through a set of pulleys from the coop door to his bedroom window, and the next morning simply pulls. The door swings open, the hens eat, and the boy stays under his red blanket. His father is so impressed that he never assigns him another chore. Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet opens on that small act of laziness and genius, and it never lets the reader forget that the man who gave New York its Thanksgiving balloons began as that boy.
The boy is Tony Sarg, and the book follows him from the farmyard to London, where he finds that nobody is making marionettes for children, then to New York and a studio of strings and painted heads. Macy’s comes calling, first for animated window displays and then for something much larger.
Play Is the Method in Balloons Over Broadway
The central idea of Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet is that Sarg never stopped playing, and Sweet makes the art enact it. Many pages are photographs of objects she built: wooden toys, spools of thread, a jointed papier-mâché puppet with buttons for a waistcoat, swatches of patterned cloth. These sit beside loose watercolour drawings of Sarg in his red vest and bow tie, so that the made thing and the imagined thing share the page. The effect is of a cluttered, happy studio where the picture book itself has been assembled by hand.
The watercolour scenes have their own logic. Crowds are painted in muted blues, greys and greens, a sea of hats and coats, while the parade figures above them are saturated tangerine, lime and pink. The eye goes where the joy is. When Macy’s adds caged lions and tigers to the procession, the children in the crowd recoil, and their roars and growls are scribbled in faint pencil across the page, a lovely touch that makes the noise visible without making it frightening.
Who the Parade Was For
The most quietly interesting stretch of Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet explains why Macy’s held a parade at all. Many of the store’s workers were immigrants who missed the street festivals of home as the holidays approached, and Sarg, himself born far from New York, built them a carnival of floats and costumes. The result marched from Harlem to Herald Square on Thanksgiving Day in 1924. It is a gentle, accurate way of showing children that an American holiday ritual was partly made by newcomers, and Sweet trusts the fact to speak for itself.
From there, Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet becomes a series of problems. The animals scare the children. Sarg’s marionettes are too small to be seen. Rubber figures propped on sticks are visible but heavy, and the crowds grow too deep to see over. A lovely double spread shows a Macy’s executive on the telephone asking, “Tony, can you think of something spectacular?” The answer leads to helium, rubberised silk and a clever reversal of how a puppet is held. Before launch day, Sarg’s anxieties float above him as thought bubbles: too much gas, a sharp edge, the elevated railway overhead. Children will recognise the feeling of a plan that might go wrong.
Where Balloons Over Broadway Flatters
The admiration is so complete that it occasionally tips into flattery. Macy’s appears only as a generous patron, never as a shop with a reason to draw a million people to its door the day before the Christmas season, and the 1933 advertisement reproduced at the back is cheerfully presented without comment. Older readers may want one sentence acknowledging that commerce and wonder travelled together here.
The pacing also asks for patience. The sentences run longer than in most picture books, and the balloons do not rise until late, so the youngest listeners may want the pictures before the words. For children of five and up, though, Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet rewards a slow read, and the back pages repay a second one: a child’s letter asking Sarg for a king, two princesses and a dragon, and a photograph of the puppeteer clowning beside an elephant balloon in the Goodyear hangar.
Melissa Sweet and the Sarg Line
The sense of play in the art has a source. Sweet, who lives in Rockport, Maine, has illustrated close to a hundred books and has said that watercolour is her favourite medium. She has described a colour-theory teacher who threw out most of her art supplies and made her learn to mix from a limited palette, and she credits Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear books with convincing her she could make picture books at all. Her later Some Writer!, a biography of E. B. White, uses the same scrapbook method at much greater length. Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet earned her the Sibert Medal, the library world’s highest honour for a children’s information book.
Sarg himself had a stranger life than the book has room for. He was born in Cobán, Guatemala, in 1880 to a German consul and an English mother, trained as a soldier in Germany, and settled in New York only in 1915. He died in March 1942, the same year the parade was halted for the war. Sweet’s note adds a lineage worth sharing with children: one of Sarg’s apprentices taught Jim Henson, which makes the Muppets distant grandchildren of these upside-down puppets. Families curious about that tradition can explore the collections of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, which Sweet thanks in her acknowledgements.
Final Thoughts
Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet belongs on the shelf for the night before Thanksgiving, read once before bed and again the next morning, before the first giant rounds Central Park. It pairs well with Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, a holiday story from an older century about children improvising a feast, and with Brian Floca’s Locomotive, another picture book that makes a machine thrilling. Readers who fall for Sweet’s collage should look for A Splash of Red, Jen Bryant’s life of the painter Horace Pippin, which Sweet illustrated with the same affection. The lesson of this one is simple and worth handing on: the best ideas often begin as a way to avoid getting out of bed.