NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The Knicks\u2019 victory \u2014 after a 53-year drought \u2014 has electrified New Yorkers. Thousands of fans have flooded into lower Manhattan for the parade, and police said all the viewing pens along the route were full less than three hours before the procession.<\/p>\n
Read more:<\/p>\n
Still, people kept streaming into the area on crammed subways, looking to get as close as they could or find any elevated spot to catch a glimpse. Fans lined up on the pedestrian walkway over the Brooklyn Bridge, where they were not close enough to see the parade or the ceremony at City Hall but would be close enough to hear it over loudspeakers.<\/p>\n
The parade was set to start at 10 a.m. Thursday near Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan and head up Broadway on the skyscraper-flanked route dubbed the \u201cCanyon of Heroes.\u201d The parade began just after 10:30 a.m.<\/p>\n
The mile-long procession (1.6 kilometers) ends at City Hall, where the players are to get another traditional tribute: keys to the city.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere will be performances, there will be New Yorkers, there will be the team and there will be history,\u201d Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday.<\/p>\n
Knicks fans turn out in force<\/p>\n
Several blocks away from the parade route, fans stood shoulder to shoulder \u2014 sometimes on each other\u2019s shoulders \u2014 hoping to catch a glimpse of the procession between buildings. Others climbed on traffic lights, sanitation trucks or knicks-colored blue and orange buckets they\u2019d brought from home.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had to be here today,\u201d said Shareefa Wallace, 34, who got up at 3 a.m. to make her way from suburban Long Island. She grew up in the city going to Knicks games, and she sported the souvenir jersey of one of the legends from that era, Patrick Ewing.<\/p>\n
She arrived at 7 a.m., too late to get into one of the viewing pens, but \u201cwe have to soak up what she can get,\u201d said Wallace, a school psychologist who was on summer break.<\/p>\n
\u2018The New York vibe\u2019<\/p>\n
Nearby bars and delis filled with fans, some wishing they\u2019d arrived at dawn. But many seemed at peace with the fact that they would only experience the parade from a distance.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re fine with the fray, we just want to be with the New York energy and the New York vibe,\u201d said Jean Strong, who came to the parade from Harlem with his nephew and sister.<\/p>\n
Terrell Emerson, a chef who grew up in Queens before leaving New York, said he\u2019d driven from Maryland with his daughter Madison \u2013 named in honor of the Knicks home arena, Madison Square Garden.<\/p>\n
Madison, beaming, held a handwritten sign announcing she\u2019d skipped her fifth-grade graduation to be in attendance.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been 53 years \u2014 come on. That was a no-brainer,\u201d Emerson said.<\/p>\n
Stars and Knicks legends<\/p>\n
Knicks legends Walt \u201cClyde\u201d Frazier \u2014 a member of the \u201970s champion teams \u2014 and 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\u2019 play-by-play announcer on MSG Network, was set to emcee the City Hall ceremony.<\/p>\n
Alicia Keys, the singer who collaborated with Jay-Z on the New York-loving 2009 hit \u201cEmpire State of Mind,\u201d has been tapped to perform.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow could I not?\u201d Keys said Wednesday in a social media video that featured her on the phone with Knicks forward OG Anunoby.<\/p>\n
A parade decades in the making<\/p>\n
The mere fact that the parade is happening is historic in itself. Although the Knicks won the championship twice in the 1970s, the city didn\u2019t 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 jam-packed 1973 ceremony outside City Hall.<\/p>\n
This time, the city is going all out. A police officer could be seen holding a sign reading, \u201cThis is really happening.\u201d<\/p>\n
And a massive security operation<\/p>\n
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\u2019 run to victory over the San Antonio Spurs.<\/p>\n
At one point before the parade, a small group of people were crushed against a barrier near Fulton Street, a key subway hub, pinned between a swelling crowd and a group of police officers shoving the barrier to keep fans penned in.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Why does New York throw ticker-tape parades?<\/p>\n
Ticker-tape parades derive their name from the narrow strips of paper used by telegraph-era \u201cstock ticker\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Knicks\u2019 parade will be the 210th, and it comes after a ticker-tape bash for the WNBA\u2019s New York Liberty in 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 New York is celebrating the Knicks in classic style Thursday, throwing a ticker-tape parade…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":745337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-745336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/745337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}