KNICKS REACTION:

A New York State of Mind

By Gena Gerbier

I joined more than two million people in lower Manhattan to celebrate the Knicks. Not because I follow basketball but because I wanted to feel what the city was feeling. The news cycle has been relentless. The political climate is uncertain. As an American from Canada, married to an American from France, my husband and I occasionally find ourselves asking the question many New Yorkers ask during difficult times: Should we stay or should we go?

Under the threat of rain, I hopped on my bicycle and followed the Hudson River Path downtown. As I encountered more and more orange and blue clad fans, I felt slightly out of place in my Oxford shirt among the sea of jerseys. However, that feeling soon disappeared as eyes connected and smiles greeted me. There was joy in the air and a sense of belonging that felt contagious.

I couldn’t stay for the entire parade because I had to meet with clients. As a real estate advisor, I spend my days helping people navigate their own New York stories and lately I have been encouraged by the number of people choosing to build their futures here.

On the way home later that afternoon, I realized the parade had reminded me why I fell in love with New York in the first place. My New York love story began in the summer of 1995. I arrived to study acting at The Neighborhood Playhouse. Like so many before me, I was seduced by the city’s energy and its promise of endless possibilities.

A few years later, I met my husband, Stéphane, in the West Village. When our daughter was born in 2000, New York became more than a place to chase dreams. It became a place where dreams could actually come true. On September 10, 2001, our daughter took her first steps. The next day, everything changed.

We watched helplessly as the towers fell less than two miles from our home and a steady stream of people, covered in gray dust, walked north silently along the West Side Highway. The sky was blue and the sun was shining. Yet it remains the darkest day imaginable.

The weeks that followed were filled with uncertainty. Friends left. Neighbors left. Predictions about New York’s future were grim. Like many families downtown, we wondered what would come next. Should we leave NYC? Where would we call home? Instead, we stayed. Fear eventually turned into defiance. Not the reckless kind. The loving kind. If everyone who loved New York left when it was broken, how would it ever heal?

A few months later, we opened a children’s store on Hudson Street with friends. Opening a business at that moment felt both terrifying and hopeful. We were making a bet on New York at a time when many people were betting against it.

The community responded in ways we never imagined. Families embraced us. Children returned week after week. What began as a neighborhood store eventually grew into two stores and a business that attracted attention far beyond the West Village. Looking back, what I remember most about our stores, Yoya and Yoyamart, is not the growth itself but the connections. We knew our customers by name. We watched their children grow up. We became part of the fabric of the neighborhood.

The years passed quickly. Our stores grew, our family grew, and in 2006 our son was born. The city that had once represented possibility had become something much more meaningful. It had become the place where we were building our lives.

Somewhere along the way, New York stopped feeling like the place we had moved to and became the place where we belonged. Then came another challenge ─ the financial crisis of 2008 hit New York hard. Storefronts emptied and businesses struggled. Once again, predictions about the city’s decline filled the air. And once again, New York adapted and so did we.

This pattern has repeated itself throughout my years here. New York gets knocked down. New Yorkers grieve, struggle, then somehow find a way forward. That is why the atmosphere at the Knicks parade affected me more than I expected.

It wasn’t really about basketball for me. It was about seeing millions of people come together to celebrate something joyful. It was about pride. It was about resilience. The city has changed and I certainly have as well, but one thing remains constant: it’s the story of New York and New York stays with you, no matter where you are.

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We Are So Back – A Few Hours Above the City With the Knicks in Five

By Waleed Shahid

I keep trying to name what got lifted that night the Knicks won, and the thing is, I’ve been thinking about it wrong, because it wasn’t something that got lifted so much as something that got put down ─ a whole set of instructions we’d been carrying so long we’d stopped calling them instructions and started calling them just, you know, how things are. A public is, among other things, a set of beliefs about other people, and ours had curdled.

The pandemic taught us another person’s breath could end you, which is a thing you cannot really learn and then unlearn. Biden’s lesson was almost soothing in how it absolved us, suggesting that governance happened elsewhere, among adults, and we could return to our lives as its audience. Trump’s lesson was the one that men have always felt they’ve needed to believe. That the world is dog eat dog, that the tender parts of you are just the parts that haven’t been bitten yet. And then Eric Adams taught us to get on the subway and immediately figure out who was going to be the problem.

What I want to say is that we had been clenched since 2020, all of us, more or less — the jaw, the shoulders, the whole accumulated brace of it — and then the Knicks won and whatever had been held there let go, rose a few feet above the city, hovered, as if deciding whether to come back. (It hasn’t yet.)

Maybe it started a week earlier. Down 29, nine minutes left, a man named OG Anunoby — who is not known for his expressiveness, who conducts himself on a basketball court with the affect of someone doing a task he finds moderately interesting — went up for a ball that was already a foot above his head and tipped it in, and something cracked open in the city that hadn’t been open in a while.

And then there were just people, which is rarer than it sounds. Dancing, embracing strangers, being a public in the almost-forgotten sense, the sense that requires you to look at all of it — the mess, the proximity, the noise, the total absurdity of that many humans pressed together choosing the stupid silliness of joy — and not flinch.

For five years after the pandemic there was a whole genre of essay asking whether New York was over, whether the public was finished. And then the Knicks won and people shouted at screens and into the night sky and at strangers they would never see again, and the answer came back so exquisitely simple. Fuck no, we are so back.

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Mamdani’s Knicks Parade Address: Key Excerpts

Over these past weeks, as the Knicks kept winning, our city has come together as one.

Neighbors invited neighbors over. Strangers high fived one another in the street. Subway conductors sang their announcements and bus drivers danced behind the wheel. So often, when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to by a moment of tragedy or adversity, like 9-11, Hurricane Sandy and COVID.

What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy. For as long as we live, we will remember this feeling of a city together, a city alive, a city overcome by happiness. But let’s not pretend that this was inevitable.

They gave the Spurs a 99.6%chance of winning… It’s in that .4% that we go to work. It’s in that .4% that Jalen Brunson — the same guy that so many said was too small — proves that not only is he good enough; he is the new standard for greatness. It’s in that .4% that OG Anunoby watches the ball float from the top of the arc and starts running toward the basket, fingers reaching towards the heavens…

Most of all, it’s in that .4% that the Knicks do what New Yorkers have always done when we are told something is impossible. We find a way. We win. Standing here before what feels like the entire city, there’s a Jalen Brunson quote I can’t stop thinking about.

“You are allowed to think about the worst possible scenario. But you got to go out there and do something about it.”…Time after time, we thought about the worst possible scenario. And time after time, the Knicks went out there and did something about it.

The Knicks did not just win for New York City — they won like New York City.

What is New York if not your back up against the wall, a dream that feels just out of reach, a rent payment you don’t know how you will ever make? What is New York if not 99.6% of the world stacked against you? And who are New Yorkers if not people who hear those odds and smile? Who look at a .4% chance of success and ask, “Why are you giving me a headstart?”

This is our city. This is our team. For 53 years, we watched. For 53 years, we waited. Now, we’ve won.