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We have but one question for New Yorkers who spent all weekend cheering themselves hoarse, hugging strangers, and roaming streets that echoed with Ja Rule's baritone and the explosions of bootleg fireworks.
Are you ready to do it again?
On Saturday night, mere minutes after the New York Knicks clinched their first championship in 53 years and bedlam broke out in the five boroughs, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that there would be a ticker-tape parade to honor the Knicks on Thursday morning.
The parade—which will be the first-ever for a Knicks championship—will begin at 10 a.m. near Battery Park and end at City Hall, where all the Knicks will be presented with keys to the city.
"The team, frankly, reflects the city—the relentlessness, the drive, the hustle, the never-give-up," Mayor Mamdani told ABC7 on Sunday. "You look at the stories of each of these individual players, so many of them overlooked at different points in their careers. And Mike Brown built a team where every single player had a role. And even over the course of the finals, we saw different players show up for this team, show up for the city. And as a city, we can't wait to show up for all of them."
Mamdani himself was at a kind of dry-run for Thursday's salute: The mayor appeared with Knicks guard and Brooklyn native Jose Alvarado, and his San Antonio-raised teammate Jordan Clarkson, at Sunday's Knickerbocker Avenue Puerto Rican Day Parade in Bushwick.
Why didn't Mayor John Lindsay honor the 1970 or the 1973 Knicks with a parade? Basically, he didn't feel like it. Kenneth Cobb, the deputy commissioner at the City's Department of Records and Information services, told the City Reporter that Lindsay "discontinued the ticker-tape parade celebration in favor of more informal receptions." Lindsay did give the 1973 Knicks "diamond jubilee medallions marking the 75th anniversary of the City's consolidation in 1898," which, in our judgement, does not replace the exultant feeling of being carried through the Financial District's Canyon of Heroes while millions of tiny pieces of paper flutter down from the sky.
If this weekend's well-populated festivities are any indication, demand for space along the one-mile-long route will be high—higher, we hope, than the April 20, 1951 parade to honor General Douglas MacArthur. "The City's police commissioner estimated that 7.5 million people lined city streets," a City archivist wrote in a 2023 blog post. "If the crowd estimates were true, the New York Times calculated that 'would leave only 335,099 New Yorkers at home or at work.'"
Juneteenth, now an official City holiday, falls on Friday—what better way to kick off a long weekend than by watching Knicks center Mitchell Robinson drive his pickup truck with his teammates standing in the bed? "I think we all know that this could end up being the largest parade in New York City's history," the mayor said later on Monday morning.
One group of New Yorkers who may get left out: students who are scheduled to take the science Regents exams, which are being held on Thursday. Chalkbeat reports that some of them have started a petition to ask the mayor to move the parade, because, as one of the students argues, it's the parade that is the real exam, actually.
"The parade is an educational experience in itself, rich with lessons about sportsmanship, history, and the power of dreams coming true," student Sebastian Crosa wrote. Give Sebastian an A++ in irresistible teenage sophistry.