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 Downtown Alliance.
Processions honored historical anniversaries, firefighters, the Red Cross, ship rescues, an attempted ship rescue and even a ship replica (the Mayflower II, in 1957). There were a handful of parades for U.S. presidents and dozens for visiting foreign leaders, some notorious. For example, French Marshal Henri Petain was showered with ticker tape in 1931 and later convicted of treason for heading the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
By the time Lindsay took office in 1966, not everyone loved a parade.
Lower Manhattan businesses resented the frequent disruptions, and some New Yorkers saw the celebrations as rote and manufactured. Lindsay and his public events commissioner — former Knicks captain and jump-shot ace John “Bud” Palmer — eschewed ticker-tape extravaganzas for visiting dignitaries, instead favoring more personal and inexpensive gatherings, according to news stories by The Associated Press and other outlets at the time.
By 1970, the nation was in a recession. The city events budget had been cut, and Palmer — whose salary was a symbolic $1 — was peeved about the rejection of a $372 bill (about $3,300 today) for some materials for a 1969 ticker-tape parade celebrating the New York Mets’ World Series win, according to memos unearthed by the city Department of Records & Information Services.
There was no ticker-tape bash for the New York Jets’ 1970 Super Bowl win, which came days after such a parade honored the Apollo 8 astronauts ‘ historic orbit around the moon.
The Knicks topped the Los Angeles Lakers to win the NBA championship later that year. Lindsay, a liberal Republican, sent a congratulatory telegram and hosted the Knicks for a reception at the official mayoral residence, according to news coverage at the time.
When the Knicks bested the Lakers again to win the 1973 title, Lindsay scheduled a celebration in front of City Hall and urged “every New Yorker who can to come.”
Officials apparently were startled when more than 2,000 mostly young fans did just that. Police struggled to keep the speakers’ stand clear, according to a New York Times article from the day.
But the ceremony went ahead as planned, and Lindsay bestowed the team with a distinctly municipal honor: medals commemorating the 75th anniversary of the unification of New York’s five boroughs into one city.
Parades for championship sports teams picked up in subsequent decades. The city’s most recent ticker-tape festivities honored the WNBA’s New York Liberty in 2024.
