Jubilant New Yorkers flood city for ticker-tape parade to honor NBA champion Knicks in Canyon of Heroes

Jubilation broke out on the streets of Manhattan Thursday as New Yorkers exalted the Knicks in a ticker-tape parade up lower Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes.

For a few hours on a humid, overcast morning, the city — long-suffering but proud, hard-working but ready to celebrate raucously — grabbed its champions in a bear hug and held them tight.

"They mean everything," said 39-year-old Miracle Pierre. "My childhood. Memories with my dad. Memories with my son."

An estimated two million fans and 10,000 cops lined the route from the Battery north to City Hall, according to the NYPD. The fans stood eight deep in places, leaned from office windows and hung from scaffolding. Through orange and blue confetti rain came Knicks greats new and old, some chomping cigars and swigging champagne: Jalen Brunson out for a stroll with the Larry O'Brien Trophy and slapping some high-fives; Mike Brown, leaning over the bike rack barriers to hug supporters; Mikal Bridges, grinning like a goofy kid, shooting video from atop a parade float; kingly Walt "Clyde" Frazier, waving from the back seat of a black 1952 Chrysler Imperial Parade Phaeton convertible, the same vehicle used to carry Apollo 11 astronauts in a 1969 ticker-tape parade.

"What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy. As long as we live, we will remember this city together, alive and overcome by happiness," Mayor Zohran Mamdani, wearing a Knicks jersey, told the crowd at a post-parade rally in the plaza in front of City Hall.

The Knicks — who were given a 0.4% chance of winning Game 4 against the San Antonio Spurs before they mounted one of the most improbable comebacks in NBA playoff history — had done "what New Yorkers do when they’re told something is impossible. We find a way and we win," the mayor said.

They "did not just win for New York City — they won like New York City. What is New York, if not your back up against the wall, a dream that feels just out of reach, a rent payment you don’t know how you’ll ever make?" said Mamdani. "What is New York, if not 99.6% of the world stacked against you, and who are New Yorkers if not people who hear those odds and smile?"

When it was Brunson’s turn to talk, he had to wait so he could be heard over the cheers. "Somehow, some way, I knew we were going to find a way to get this done," he said, and addressed the fans directly: "Y’all are some pretty hard critics, but we appreciated it, at least I do."

New Yorkers have come to this plaza to mourn Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, to celebrate the laying of the first trans-Atlantic communication cable, the return of those Apollo 11 astronauts and other sports champions. The plaza was also the site of a rapprochement — or at least, a public handshake — between the mayor and Knicks owner James Dolan, who feuded in recent weeks over watch parties and security measures around playoff games.

"I don’t need your vote, I don’t need to quote to you about what happened here," Dolan told the crowd. "If you’re real Knick fans, you know it already. ... We’re going to keep working to bring you even better basketball, although it’s hard to imagine we get much better than this."

Thursday’s ticker-tape parade, accompanied by bagpipes, drums, high school brass bands and Knicks dancers, was at least the 210th in the city’s history, according to the Downtown Alliance, a business improvement group.

In the days leading up to this one, entrepreneurs charged as much as $750 to save prime viewing spots. On the morning of, fans piled onto the subways and the Long Island Rail Road and nearly brought the pedestrian corridors at Penn Station to a standstill before making their way to lower Manhattan.

"I've been to a Giants parade. I've been to a Yankees parade but I wasn't sure I would ever see a Knicks parade. I’ve been dreaming of this since I was 14, ” said Anthony Delacruz, boarding a 5:21 a.m. Merrick train into the city. The train had turned standing room only well east of his station. In the pre-dawn gloaming the railroad parking lots and platforms were a sea of blue and orange. Some trains were so packed that conductors gave up trying to collect fares.

By 5:30 a.m., Penn was so packed a reporter waited for four subways to come and go before edging close enough on the platform to board a train. Working stiffs charged through basketball-loving blockers. Julian Rendon, 26, an IT worker from Port Jefferson, displayed a poster he’d made of Brunson gazing beatifically out from some clouds in the heavens. "He literally saved New York," Rendon said. "If it wasn't for him we wouldn't have won the last game."

On this day, fans reveled in basketball memories pro and not. Reginald Clark, of Brooklyn, recounted for a reporter Larry Johnson's 4-point play in Game 3 of the 1999 Eastern Conference Finals — which was glorious, but served only to stave off a Spurs series win — and some of his own good times playing on the courts in Brooklyn. He'd come straight from his night job to the parade. 

Ed Zaldivar, 50, of Jersey City, said that when he was in high school he'd bought a signed poster of former Knick John Starks, hung it up at home and paid it off in installments. To make the parade, he put in for time off at work, put on hold seeing family in Texas and packed into a hotel room with his family and friends. "I’ve been waiting for this my whole life," Zaldivar said.

Superfans assembled: Spike Lee, Ben Stiller, Timothée Chalamet, Tracy Morgan, Mariska Hargitay, Fat Joe, Mary J. Blige. The singer Alicia Keys, whose "Empire State of Mind" was inescapable in the city’s bars and restaurants this spring, gave the song another spin in a live rendition outside City Hall.

In the crowd outside, Tiki Barber, the great Giants running back and now WFAN radio host, mused about New York’s odd sports culture: "It's a basketball town, but they've never had basketball championships here ... yeah, it goes back to the '70s, and most of us weren't even born yet, so this is amazing. They galvanized and unified the city, which is pretty cool."

Nearby, Letitia James, New York's attorney general, said she was, indeed, galvanized. The story of Brunson, 6-foot-2 and 190 pounds — no pipsqueak, but undersized by NBA standards — "really resonates with me," she said. "People who counted him out, who said he was too small, too short, and here he is a champion. And that really is the story for countless number of individuals who have been told that they should get back and get in line."
She added: "And I was told that as well."

At the barricades along the parade route, hungry-for-action fans tossed a beach ball. When it bounced into the street, they cheered for the cop who tipped it back into the crowd. They cheered at the slightest provocation. They chanted at an MTA bus that stopped and let off workers — "San-i-ta-tion!" though it was not clear if they worked for the Department of Sanitation. When a boy in a wheelchair was escorted by police down Broadway, they cheered for him too.

For a time, city officials shut down all lanes of traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, barred traffic and parking south of Canal Street and ordered subways to skip all Manhattan stops south of Canal. The NYPD deployed more officers than it had combined for the 2012 Giants Super Bowl and 2009 Yankees World Series parades. "This is larger than New Year’s Eve in Times Square," former NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan told NBC4. "This is a massive undertaking for the police department. ... This is an unprecedented moment in New York history."

As the festivities wound down, Alejandro Swaby told a reporter he’d taken an Uber and a water taxi to make it over from Brooklyn and that he’d seen some of the players go by. "We were going to make it no matter what happened," he said. He said the atmosphere was joyous. "Families are out, kids are out, even ladies with babies."

In midtown, Tara Del Mundo, 32, a nurse from Massapequa, sipped a Guinness at The Irish Exit, a bar in Moynihan Train Hall where dozens of patrons wore Knicks shirts. She’d driven into Manhattan at 5 a.m., parked on the Upper East Side and then met up with her sister-in-law, Karyl Del Mundo, at Church and Vesey Street at 6:20 a.m.

"That was too late," Del Mundo said. "We waited for hours in the crowd, but there was no movement, so we came here."

She said she was having a good time in the air-conditioned bar where people cheered when Knicks players came on the screen. "It's the best," Del Mundo said. "It's just so exciting. I feel like they really deserve it."

In Penn Station, Logan Grotas and Steven Schwartz, 21-year-old college students from Roslyn, judged the day a success. "Having the confetti coming down was everything I ever could have dreamed of," Schwartz said. "You dream of a moment like this and when it actually happens it's just surreal."

Having spent their formative years watching what Grotas called, charitably, "not-great basketball," the two felt they’d witnessed something remarkable in the last few weeks, on and off court.

It "made me very proud to be a New Yorker," Schwartz said.

"It's beautiful to see everyone come together and root for one thing," Grotas said. "I've never seen anything like this."

The two snagged "no parking" NYPD flyers that had been put up on street poles, as souvenirs.

The flyers said "No Parking: Knicks Championship Ticker Tape Parade."

"I probably will frame it," Grotas said.