The Knicks have won 3 NBA titles, but their first parade was held up for 55 years by a budget crisis and a rejected $372 expense report
New York Knicks fans have waited forever for this. Thursday’s ticker-tape parade for the new NBA champions will be a first. When the team won the title before, in 1970 and ‘73, they weren’t honored with New York’s signature procession. Why not? There’s no one definitive explanation. But there is some informative context: The ’70s wins came at a time when then-Mayor John Lindsay had reined in the confetti-tossing spectacles. He celebrated the Knicks at the mayoral mansion and then City Hall — august settings, for sure, but not the fabled trip through lower Broadway’s “Canyon of Heroes.” If there’s pent-up demand for a Knicks parade, current Mayor Zohran Mamdani seems determined to meet it. He has predicted that Thursday’s celebration might be “the largest parade in New York City history.” “There will be performances, there will be New Yorkers, there will be the team and there will be history,” the mayor, a Democrat, said Monday while visiting a city facility that prepared temporary “Champions Way” signs for the parade route. The event is set to start at 10 a.m. Thursday near Battery Park and end at City Hall. New York’s ticker-tape tradition began in the late 19th century, when brokerage firm workers watched parades from office windows and — apparently to add decoration — flung out the narrow paper used by telegraph-era “stock ticker” machines, according to the Downtown Alliance, a lower Manhattan advocacy group. It joined with the private Museum of the City of New York to research and list the parades. The organizations say the ticker-tape tradition began with an 1886 event honoring the dedication of the Statue of Liberty and became city-organized in 1919 to welcome returning World War I soldiers. The first ticker-tape celebration of athletes was a tribute to the 1924 U.S. Olympic team. The parades proliferated, celebrating various feats in aviation, war, sports, music, space travel and more, according to the museum and the