Terrell Emerson, a chef who grew up in Queens before leaving New York, said he’d driven from Maryland with his daughter Madison – named in honor of the Knicks home arena, Madison Square Garden.
People wait for the start of the New York Knicks ticker-tape parade to celebrate their first NBA championship win in two generations in New York on Thursday.AMIR HAMJA/NYT
Madison, beaming, held a handwritten sign announcing she’d skipped her fifth-grade graduation to be in attendance.
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“It’s been 53 years — come on. That was a no-brainer,” Emerson said.
The parade is 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 “Canyon of Heroes.” The procession is to end at City Hall, where the players are to get another traditional tribute: keys to the city.
New York Knicks fans pass through Union Square station on their way to a parade for the NBA champions in Lower Manhattan on Thursday.JOSE A. ALVARADO JR./NYT
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.
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’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 jam-packed 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.
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.
Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz in New York and AP Basketball Writer Brian Mahoney in Southampton, New York, contributed.