BAY RIDGE — Sixteen-year-old Korinna Vagelatos has watched the Ragamuffin Parade since she was a little girl growing up in Bay Ridge. However, she’s never actually marched in it.

That’s about to change.

On Oct. 3, the Xaverian High School junior and her classmate, senior Marc Hindy, will step onto Third Avenue as members of Ragamuffin’s inaugural class of junior marshals, introduced specially for the parade’s 60th anniversary.

“I think that’s what we should, as adults, be really proud of — that there are kids that give back to the community,” said Allison Greaker, president of the 2026 Ragamuffin Committee. “At some point, as adults, we realize that volunteerism is so important to our wellness, but to find kids that realize it too, and that’s how they were brought up, it’s the essence of the Ragamuffin Parade.”

Korinna started a book club for Xaverian’s Genesis middle school students, volunteers at the Holy Cross Outreach Center, and is an award-winning senior scout.

Marc founded the Active Minds program at the Bay Ridge Center to connect local youth with seniors through activities designed to stimulate cognitive function and delay dementia.

“I think it’s always very important to give back to people, but especially the people who helped you and where you’re from,” Korinna said. “So, when I get to help Bay Ridge and continue supporting it in any way I can, like through the Ragamuffin Parade in years to come, I will always take the opportunity.”

(Photos: Courtesy of Ragamuffin Parade Committee, Ed Wilkinson)

The tradition the students will help lead this year began six decades ago with a Catholic priest and a Bay Ridge resident looking to revive an old New York custom.

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In 1966, Father James McKenna of Our Lady of Angels Church and Bay Ridge resident Cliff Scanlon founded the parade as a small parish event, drawing inspiration from the old Ragamuffin Day tradition, when children dressed in ragged, oversized clothing and wandered the streets asking neighbors and passersby for pennies, treats, or small gifts. Within just a few years, Ragamuffin became a major Bay Ridge event, and by 1972, approximately 6,000 children marched as an estimated 35,000 spectators lined the route.

Sixty years after the parade began at Our Lady of Angels, the parish will return to the spotlight as the Grand Marshal of this year’s anniversary celebration.

For Father Kevin Abels, pastor of Our Lady of Angels, the honor recognizes not only the parish’s place in Ragamuffin history, but its continuing role in the community — despite changes the neighborhood has seen since the ’60s.

“[Ragamuffin] speaks to the heart of the kind of people that we have willing to support the neighborhood and to bring the faith out into the neighborhood,” he said. “The parade is an opportunity for us to kind of, in our diversity and the changing demographics, hold on to something that gave so much life in the past. We’re kind of building on that for the present and the future.”

That evolution is visible each year, as the parade’s Catholic roots now mingle with the many schools, families and community organizations that call Bay Ridge home.

Tablet Editor Emeritus Ed Wilkinson has watched and photographed that mix for years since moving to the neighborhood in the 1990s. His own son even joined the tradition as a child, marching one year as a bumblebee and another as a firefighter.

“Everybody is one, and we all march together — public schools, Catholic schools, organizations,” Wilkinson said. “Everybody’s got their banner. To me, that catches the spirit of the event.”

For Greaker, those six decades are more than old photographs and parade statistics.

As a child in Bay Ridge in the 1970s, she was among the costumed kids marching down Third Avenue. One year, her mother transformed her into Mr. Peanut, fashioning a life-size peanut costume from cardboard and completing it with a top hat and monocle. Greaker believes the homemade creation even won her a bicycle.

By the time she was a teenager, Greaker had gone from marching in the parade to volunteering for it. She continued helping through college before moving to Manhattan. But Ragamuffin eventually drew her back in. After returning to Bay Ridge in 2014, Greaker joined the committee for its 50th anniversary in 2016. A decade later, she is its president as the parade marks another milestone.

“The Ragamuffin Parade is about kids marching with their parents, making costumes,” Greaker said. “It’s a tradition in Bay Ridge that brings the community together.”

Greaker says remembering Ragamuffin’s age has never been difficult.

“I’m as old as the parade,” she said with a laugh. “That’s how I remember how old the parade is.”