The Knicks’ Championship Win Transforms the City

Photographs by Victor Llorente for The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Before the sun had fully risen, the people were already coming. Around five-thirty in the morning, a man rode a commandeered Citi Bike down a train platform in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, playing music from a speaker. Another guy was wearing a Knicks flag as a cape, two of its corners knotted at his throat. Everybody was waiting for the A—it was already full of bodies when it came. At almost all of the train’s stops, the doors would open and the new arrivals would start up a fresh cheer. The metal-and-white motif of the subway car was overtaken by blue and orange, and the conductor’s announcements were drowned out by chants.

The Fulton Street station usually looks like the interior of a lightly used U.F.O.—sleek, cavernous, haunted by a mysterious connection between form and function. Now it was clogged with partiers. The ticker-tape parade through lower Manhattan, where Broadway takes on the misty nickname the Canyon of Heroes, wasn’t supposed to start until ten o’clock. But everybody knew that there’d be only so much space, and that others were coming, too. You had to find a spot and keep it.

One of the many miracles of the New York Knicks’ championship run through the playoffs (a phrase whose novelty will never lose its sheen) was how it transformed space in the city. As the team entered the N.B.A. Finals on a hot streak for the ages—they’d swept two opponents in a row, and ended up winning the championship having lost only three games, by a total of six points—New York’s neighborhoods took on new guises, just by becoming so thrillingly full. In Fort Greene, for instance, a lively neighborhood nobody would think to call underpopulated, game days at the sports bar FancyFree, or the Mexican-Cuban restaurant Habana Outpost, made it so that you couldn’t see the white lines of the crosswalk in photographs or videos shared in Instagram. Friends of mine started showing up at sports bars just after noon to grab a spot at the bar for an eight-thirty tipoff. Intersections became improvised plazas, clotted with bodies. People, people, everywhere!