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’ victory \u2014 after a 53-year drought – has electrified New Yorkers, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has predicted that Thursday\u2019s parade might be one of the biggest in the city’s history. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
This time, the city is going all out. <\/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
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.\u201d The procession is to end at City Hall, where the players are to get another traditional tribute: keys to the city.<\/p>\n
Knicks legends Walt \u201cClyde\u201d Frazier \u2014 a member of the \u201970s champion teams \u2014 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\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
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. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe want people to enjoy this moment,\u201d Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a planning meeting Wednesday, \u201cbut public safety comes first.\u201d<\/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
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’ parade will be the 210th, and it comes after a ticker-tape bash for the WNBA’s New York Liberty in 2024.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP Basketball Writer Brian Mahoney contributed from Southampton, New York. <\/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":270582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[26078,23940,18924,118,9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-270581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-ap-lifestyle","tag-ap-sports","tag-ap-u-s-news","tag-associated-press","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}