Pencils Up! The Knicks on Broadway

Illustration by João FazendaSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyIn the spirit of New York’s Regents exams, the standardized tests that public-school students have been taking in recent weeks, a multiple-choice question: This month, New York City witnessed which feat worthy of civic celebration? (A) The gobsmacking series of comebacks by Jalen Brunson, OG Anunoby, et al. that secured the Knicks’ first N.B.A. championship in fifty-three years. (B) The city sanitation workers’ cleanup of beer bottles, puke puddles, tons of shredded paper, gnawed blue-and-orange bagels, and other detritus from Thursday’s ticker-tape parade up Broadway. (C) The wrangling by personnel at the high schools along said parade’s thronged route in order to administer said Regents exams. The answer, of course, is all of the above. But the need for C was a matter of dispute. When Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced, shortly after the Knicks’ victory, that the city would honor them with a gala parade the following Thursday morning, he quickly drew backlash: there were Regents exams scheduled to begin at 9:15 A.M. Students launched petitions for Mamdani to cancel the tests; the Queens borough president called on the schools chancellor to step in. The Mayor’s hands were tied: this was state business. “Unlike the executive order for bedtimes, this is something I cannot repeal,” he lamented. The Mayor risked getting demerits not only from Knicks-crazed teachers but also from his next generation of constituents—at least the ones studying Biology and Living Environment, which were the test subjects on parade day. The FOMO of students and proctors was not the only problem. Parade attendance was expected to be in the millions. Ten thousand cops were deployed to the financial district; access for paradegoers was limited to twenty-three checkpoints. Attendees were advised to arrive two hours early, and the test-takers had no fast-track lane to themselves. “This is gonna be a day,” one school worker said to a colleague just before 8 A.M. outside the Richard R. Green High School of Teaching, at Beaver Street and Broadway. Administrators worked with the focussed urgency of a rescue team: clipboards, checklists, phone calls, negotiations with barricade-minding cops. A school staffer hustled a boy in a Jalen Brunson shirt past an officer, insisting that he had a test. A bro in a white ball cap pulled a vape from his lips to call out, “Good luck! You got this!” Other tête-à-têtes with police were rockier. Revellers in Knicks capes pleaded their cases fruitlessly. Miffed office workers dangled lanyards; a cop asked those without work I.D.s to show their pay stubs. So jammed were the designated viewing areas that crowds packed blocks beyond the checkpoints. Train platforms had been thronged as far east as Ronkonkoma as early as 4 A.M. During the scrum, the financial district was swarming with Knicks jerseys, honoring not only the current champs but also the beloved players who had soldiered through leaner seasons: Marbury, Ntilikina, Lin. A man in an R. J. Barrett number boasted that his was contraband. “It doesn’t get any more Knicks than wearing a bootleg,” he said. He hoped to see a Duhon or a Van Horn. Everywhere, dudes remembered guys. In that way, Thursday was not so different from most days in the city. Life carried on, or tried to. Dentists with offices along the route rescheduled cleanings. A lot of shops didn’t bother trying to open. Some storekeepers’ plans were foiled. “Yep, just like regular,” a cashier at a Century 21 on Cortlandt Street had said the day before, of the Thursday hours. The store had just kicked off a designer clearance sale. By parade time, all the entrances were shuttered with metal gates; they didn’t open until 2 P.M. A clerk at A Little Shop in NYC, in the Oculus, spent the morning giving directions to confused Jerseyites looking to get to the parade from the PATH train. “All the way up,” she told them. Some businesses explored new revenue streams. “From now on, five dollars a pee-pee,” a burly guard at an office building where passersby had sought relief said. “The other thing, twenty.” Max Funland, a new second-floor arcade on Broadway, opened five hours early for two small groups that had paid to reserve seats alongside its parade-facing windows. Michael Mimoun, a thirty-nine-year-old from Brooklyn who works in property management, coughed up five hundred dollars to watch there with a group of family and friends, including two five-year-olds. He’d first tried renting out a vacant office nearby: “A guy quoted me, like, fifteen grand.” Watching from his neon-lit perch “was really weird,” Mimoun said. “But it was incredible seeing our heroes go by.” Shortly before the parade, his group had headed to a higher floor, where the arcade stores its claw machines’ supply of stuffed toys. “There was something poetic about it,” Talia Rosenthal, Mimoun’s cousin, said. “Fifty-three years of no prizes for

Pencils Up! The Knicks on Broadway

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