Six Rose Parade Floats, In Various Stages Of Construction, Take A Test Drive On City Streets

It was half past 6 on Saturday morning, and the only crowd on a stretch of industrial road in Azusa was a knot of spectators clustered around an orange cone, phones raised and recording, as they watched a wall of yellow scrollwork and a tilted orange steam locomotive roll down the pavement at walking speed.

It was the Rose Parade’s version of a dress rehearsal for these floats, known as the MIT1 test: inspectors circle each float, checking brakes and hydraulics, and then the floats themselves creep out onto public streets for the first time, to see whether five months of steel welding, foam and paint, actually move the way they are supposed to.

Six floats made the trip this year, all built at Artistic Entertainment Services, the Azusa float house that has become one of the parade’s busiest workshops.

Katie McCormick, the company’s programs director and assistant floral director, walked the length of one float explaining the choreography.

“We take the inspectors, they walk around the floats, they check the hydraulics, the braking system,” she said. “Then we take all the floats out on the road.”

The route is modest by parade standards, less than a mile out and back, but the point isn’t distance. It’s finding out, quietly and away from the cameras of New Year’s Day, whether a hundred-foot float full of moving parts can actually steer.

One entry looked nearly finished already: a float for One Legacy’s Donate Life program, its base crawling with alebrijes, the fantastical spirit animals of Mexican folk art, painted in cobalt, magenta, and school-bus yellow. A grinning fish with a checkerboard eye leaned into a winged, striped creature mid-leap, all of it curling out of a sculpted wave of gold.

Tania Llavaneras, who represents the float for One Legacy, said the animals aren’t just decoration.

“This really represents our float and our mission,” she said, “because One Legacy is all about saving lives through the power of organ and tissue donation.”

The float body is done, she said, and the crew moves next into floral portraits in October and dry materials in November, on schedule and, by her account, further along than most.

A few yards away sat the Kindness is Free float, built for the Kindness is Free initiative of the Boys & Girls Clubs of West San Gabriel Valley and Eastside.

Chief Kindness Officer Josué Arias watched his float roll for the first time with the particular delight of someone seeing a plan become an object.

“We’re here today, this morning to see the float come to life literally,” he said, “and have the first test as it goes down the street.”

The theme this year is “Welcome,” an invitation to join what Arias calls a mission to make the world kinder, one small act at a time.

And then at 8 a.m., the floats, some of them only metal skeletons, eased out of the warehouse/garage and slowly cruised the neighborhood.

By 9-ish, the floats had made their loop and eased back into the AES lot, brakes tested, hydraulics quiet, four months still standing between this empty industrial road and the bright television lights and cameras on Colorado Boulevard.