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!
A clichéd gripe about New York these days is that there are too many lines—for matcha, for pizza, for pastries, for tickets to sundry events. Tourists and transplants, influencers thirsting after “aura”: the blame for the obnoxiously crowded streetscape gets spread pretty thin. But this new fullness—a plenitude that’s spiritual as well as physical—didn’t feel like a reason to complain. It felt like an almost organic development in the life-narrative of the city, perhaps a contrapuntal response to the emptied-out streets New Yorkers still remember from the terrifying early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns. The city feels like it’s back in full swing, announcing its electricity by the simple act of showing up.
So, yes, the streets near Fulton were dauntingly, densely packed. Cops stood near the hinges of endless yards of metal barricades, pushing the crowds through a maze of physical impediments. Mayor Zohran Mamdani had assigned more than ten thousand officers to the event, and all of them seemed busy keeping the masses at bay. The streets downtown are narrow, and many of the buildings very high, casting shadows as wide as avenues, making the sidewalks feel like dried-out waterways and the people walking them look small. Now it seemed as if the crowd, in all its collective strength, could have picked up one of those buildings and put it somewhere more convenient, the better to get a glimpse of the parade.