Origins
The first Street Parade ran on 5 September 1992, organised by the maths student Marek André Krynski and permitted as a demonstration for love, peace, freedom, generosity and tolerance. Somewhere between one and two thousand people followed two Lovemobiles from Hechtplatz along the Limmatquai and Bahnhofstrasse — nothing like the lakeside route the parade is known for today.
Part of Street Parade
12 moments in this segment.
- — The first Street Parade, 1992. Eight minutes of video from the very first Street Parade, when a few hundred dancers followed a handful of sound trucks through central Zurich. The tape circulated for years as a rip of a private recording credited to vandeloow. It is one of the few moving-image records of the founding edition.
- — The first Street Parade, 1992. A record of the very first Street Parade in 1992, posted with the original announcement text: a demonstration for love, peace, freedom, generosity and tolerance, police-approved and free, assembling from 13:30 at the Hechtplatz. The legal framing as a demonstration is what made the parade possible at all.
- — Unreleased footage of the first parade, 1992. Previously unpublished video from the first Street Parade on 5 September 1992, released for the event's thirtieth anniversary. It shows the parade at its origin, when it was a handful of floats and a crowd of about a thousand people moving through the city centre.
- — Swiss television reports the first parade, 1992. A short Tagesschau item from Swiss television broadcast on 5 September 1992, the day of the first Street Parade. The report shows the cortege on its original route along the Limmatquai and the Bahnhofstrasse, before the parade moved to the lakeside circuit it uses today. Held in the SRF archive.
- — Amateur footage with sound from the first parade, 1992. Sixteen minutes of amateur camcorder material from the 1992 parade, uploaded by DJ Dream as a gift for the twentieth edition. The uploader notes that despite the poor picture quality these are among the only amateur recordings from that day that carry live sound. It shows the small early cortege and the crowd around it.
- — The 1993 parade on camcorder. Thirty-eight minutes of footage from the 1993 Street Parade, the second edition, when the parade was still measured in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands.
- — The second Street Parade, 28 August 1993. Fifty minutes shot at the second Street Parade on 28 August 1993 by a visitor who travelled to Zurich with two friends and a heavy battery pack for the camera. The uploader notes that nobody in that small group of techno fans expected the gathering to turn into a mass event.
- — The Empire crew at the 1994 parade. Two minutes of footage tagged to the Zurich club Empire at the 1994 Street Parade, the third edition, when the event was still small enough to move through the city centre streets.
- — Camcorder impressions of the 1994 parade. Nearly fifty minutes of amateur camcorder footage from the 1994 Street Parade, digitised decades later from the original tape. It records the parade while it was still a small event, before the route around the lake basin filled with hundreds of thousands of people.
- — Swiss television questions the parade as a demonstration, 1996. An item from the SRF news magazine 10vor10, broadcast on 9 August 1996, the day before the parade. It examines the parade's legal standing as a registered demonstration and asks what a march that is about pleasure and the body still shares with the political street protests that preceded it.
- — Television documentary on the early parades, 1992 and 1993. A documentary segment from Sputnik TV covering the first two Street Parades. It sets the small founding cortege of 1992 alongside the visibly larger second edition, and gathers comments from the DJs and organisers of the period.
- — Founder Marek Krynski on how the parade began. A long studio interview with Marek Krynski, who started the Street Parade, on the night-time idea that became it, the fight against Zurich's dance ban, and how a first turnout of about 1,500 people grew into an event that fills the lake basin. He also argues that Chicago rather than Detroit was the cradle of techno.
