New York does not treat Independence Day as a single-night event, and this year it barely treats it as a single week. The country is marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, and by coincidence that milestone falls in the same year as the 50th run of Macy's fireworks tradition, which began in 1976 as a Bicentennial gesture. Layer in a record-setting gathering of tall ships and a Times Square ball that will drop eight separate times, and the city's calendar for July 3 and 4 looks less like a holiday and more like a festival that happens to have fireworks as its centerpiece.
