NEW YORK (AP) — New York is celebrating the Knicks in classic style Thursday, throwing a ticker-tape parade for the team that brought home the NBA championship longed for by generations of fans.
The Knicks’ victory — after a 53-year drought — has electrified New Yorkers, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has predicted that the parade might be one of the biggest in the city’s history.
City police said all the viewing pens along the route were full less than three hours before the procession, packed by thousands of fans who flooded into the city.
The mere fact that it’s happening is historic in itself. Although the Knicks won the championship twice in the 1970s, the city didn’t host a parade for them either time. Then-Mayor John Lindsay had cut down on ticker-tape extravaganzas for financial and other reasons, and he instead honored the Knicks at a 1970 reception at the mayoral mansion and a jampacked 1973 ceremony outside City Hall.
This time, the city is going all out.
“There will be performances, there will be New Yorkers, there will be the team and there will be history,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday.
The parade is set to start at 10 a.m. Thursday near Battery Park and head up Broadway on the skyscraper-flanked route dubbed the “Canyon of Heroes.” The procession is to end at City Hall, where the players are to get another traditional tribute: keys to the city.
Knicks legends Walt “Clyde” Frazier — a member of the ’70s champion teams — and Patrick Ewing are expected to participate in the parade, according to a person familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the details before they were publicly announced. The person said Mike Breen, the Knicks’ play-by-play announcer on MSG Network, was set to emcee the City Hall ceremony.
Alicia Keys, the singer who collaborated with Jay-Z on the New York-loving 2009 hit “Empire State of Mind,” has been tapped to perform.
“How could I not?” Keys said Wednesday in a social media video that featured her on the phone with Knicks forward OG Anunoby.
Early Thursday, Zellnor Myrie, a state senator and Knicks devotee, strolled through the plaza in front of City Hall, decked out in Knicks gear, sporting a huge smile on his face. He said the Knicks’ win, after so many years of pain and futility, brought a feeling of generational catharsis to his family, especially his father.
“I remember calling him right after we won — because he’s out of the city now — and he said, ‘I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders,'” Myrie said. “And as he said that, I got so emotional and felt it. I think all of us have memories like that, and that’s why today’s so special.”
Police plan to deploy 10,000 officers to secure the event, which follows ebullient but sometimes chaotic street celebrations and some violence during the Knicks’ run to victory over the San Antonio Spurs.
“We want people to enjoy this moment,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a planning meeting Wednesday, “but public safety comes first.”
Some 650 sanitation workers have been assigned to clean up what could be tens of thousands of pounds (kilograms) of debris, if recent history is any guide.
Ticker-tape parades derive their name from the narrow strips of paper used by telegraph-era “stock ticker” machines. New York brokerage firm workers took to tossing the paper out their office windows during parades in the late 19th century, adding a swirling aerial spectacle to the festivities.
Over the years, especially up to the mid-1960s, the city rolled out ticker-tape parades to honor visiting foreign leaders, mark historic anniversaries and hail feats in aviation, war, sports, music, space travel and more.
The Knicks’ parade will be the 210th, and it comes after a ticker-tape bash for the WNBA’s New York Liberty in 2024.
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AP Basketball Writer Brian Mahoney contributed from Southampton, New York.