The last place I expected to hear people talking about the Knicks was the Tony Awards.
Still, I interviewed Daniel Radcliffe on the red carpet and asked him about the energy in New York. Of course, Radcliffe knew I was talking about the Knicks making the playoffs (though he probably shouldn’t have said that, but when he later asked Lorne Michaels the same question, it hit him right over the head).
The last time Radcliffe witnessed a major New York sports team win was in 2012, when the New York Giants won the Super Bowl. And he’s not alone. The whole city had been waiting for that long. For perspective, it was less than a year since the last “Harry Potter” movie was released.
“And of course the Knicks never went to New York to get even closer,” Radcliffe continued, “much less do something like this.”
What’s “obvious” is the fact that the last time the Knicks made the playoffs was 15 months before Radcliffe was cast in The Boy Who Lived. And what about the final championship? JK Rowling was even younger than Radcliffe when she auditioned for Harry Potter.
The drought made this run even more unusual. All the games in the final were decided by fine margins. And the 29-point comeback in Game 4, culminating with OG Anunoby’s thrilling tip-in, will go down as “one of the top two or three greatest moments in New York sports history,” according to Yankees broadcaster Emmanuel Berbari, one of my closest friends.
As I watched the final game with friends at The Rutherford, across from Madison Square Garden, I was furious with him for not being more passionate about a sports team since the 2015 Mets because of the stakes at hand (thank you deGrom, Syndergaard, and Colon’s Bartolo). And they won.
What happened next, which I will do my best to document, was a night I never imagined I would witness in New York.
“What will happen (if we win)?” asked Radcliffe, who is T-minus with six days left until his big win. “Will it be like what happened in Philadelphia? Cars on fire and things overturned? Let’s see.”
Immediately after the Knicks’ win, the Rutherfords belted out Frank Sinatra’s “Theme from New York, New York” and Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind.” People loved it and sang along. Classic. nostalgic. Expected. I can’t say exactly how the rest of the night went.
Immediately, people on the roof of The Rutherford began slamming glasses and beer bottles onto the ground. I was struck by the calmness of the security personnel and NYPD police officers on patrol.
I’ll never forget the look on one police officer’s face. He stood as still as a statue, watching five twenty-somethings break glass one after another, and gently suggested, “You don’t need to break that many.” Then bar employees stepped forward like pieces on a chessboard and began sweeping away the debris.
At this point, I wanted to explore the chaos unfolding in the city. I walked out of the barricade with two friends, not knowing there was no practical way to get back to Rutherford with my other friends. Knicks fans were herded like cattle through Midtown, with police lining the streets and metal barricades cordoning off entire neighborhoods.
We ducked into the subway entrance and made our way through Penn Station, trying to “teleport” to a less crowded area. The station’s cavernous hallways gave the illusion that it wasn’t too crowded, but that quickly changed as I tried to step outside. Almost all exits were closed, including the grand escalator leading into Madison Square Garden. Police directed thousands of people to a single exit, creating a bottleneck the likes of which I have never seen at Penn Station while living in New York.
Even though I was adamant about staying here as a “witness to history,” the two friends I was with decided to cut their losses and take the train home. Suddenly alone, I began to question my decision not to move back uptown.
As I limped toward the exit, squished like a sardine among thousands of sweaty Knicks fans, police blocked off the last entrance to the street, forcing people to flow back and causing a massive wave of chaos.
I felt a little less anxious as I cooked in a claustrophobic person’s worst nightmare. Seeing the emotionless expressions on the officers’ faces, I began to imagine the worst-case scenario. One showdown. One bad decision. One spark. I could already imagine CNN breaking news.
However, I managed to get out of the main stream of foot traffic, so I forced myself to stop and wait for the exit to open again. As I stood there, I began to notice acts of kindness all around me. Teens and twenty-somethings on the verge of panic are comforted by friends, partners, and strangers. Small signs of humanity appeared in every direction, quietly quelling a potentially catastrophic situation caused by fear.
And even after I finally got out into the city, I continued to notice the same thing. Even in the midst of chaos, people were patient with each other. Friendly. Understand. There was no frustration when bumping into anyone, and they were greeted with smiles and comments about the Knicks, as if the entire city had agreed to give each other a pass out of typical grumpiness for one night.
It felt like the whole city was on a collective high. Maybe it was the second-hand smoke, but there was a palpable magic in the air that’s hard to explain without sounding corny. When tens of thousands of people share the same emotion at the same time, that emotion becomes contagious.
On my way east, I encountered Herald Square, the epicenter of the madness. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Dozens of people hung from scaffolding, climbed traffic lights and road signs, and turned anything within reach into their own personal playground. One man was several floors up next to a ventilation shaft. Another man, wearing a plain white T-shirt, sat hunched over inside, watching someone walk past his apartment window.
Knicks fans also held an impromptu pull-up competition at a pedestrian sign. Some people perched on street poles formed rings with their arms, turning themselves into improvised basketball hoops, allowing people below to shoot at them. It took a while, but when someone finally sank one, the crowd roared.
Two men ran as fast as they could on the scaffolding, emitting smoke from fire extinguishers and creating the illusion that the city was on fire. Below, a man and his girlfriend stomped onto the roof of a Hyundai Tucson. The windshield was shattered and all nearby cars were covered in spray paint, dust and fire extinguisher residue.
Just across the street, fans were claiming a giant yellow tow truck as their own. They stood on its peak, waving flags and chanting into the night. One day, a glass bottle flew from above. It sailed over the crowd and then shattered on the sidewalk below, just inches between a group of people unaware of the situation. For a moment, the celebration froze. Then, in a sort of hive-conscious fashion, dozens of New Yorkers instinctively began shouting at the young man who had thrown the bottle.
The suspect, wearing tinted hippie glasses, a white tank top, and a floral-print skirt, appeared sheepish, shrugging his shoulders and smiling. And just as quickly as it had begun, the moment passed. There’s no fight. There will be no retaliation. The crowd returned to celebrate. It was a pattern I witnessed all night. A moment that seemed destined to spiral is absorbed into a city that functions on a strange combination of adrenaline, joy, and mutual understanding.
What made all of this action even more surreal was that it wasn’t happening without supervision. A battalion of unarmed NYPD police officers stood on the perimeter of Herald Square, watching the madness unfold. In the three hours I spent on the road, the only time I directly witnessed a police officer intervene was when helping a vehicle move through a crowd.
A police officer yelled at the biker, “Wait, wait, wait,” as the biker tried to cross the gate. He pointed at the approaching vehicle. “Don’t you see the car coming?” Then he smiled, as if to suck all the air out of his statement. “I have to be careful.”
In conversations with the officers, who were friendly and talkative but always alert, they said they were enjoying the spectacle and were primarily there to keep people safe.
“What happens to the people climbing the signals?” I asked one young officer (who, I must say, had a nice mustache). “Will they get arrested?” Under New York state law, climbing a traffic light pole or perching on a traffic light rung is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison, a $1,000 fine, or both.
The policeman smiled. He understood that I wasn’t just asking out of curiosity.
“That’s interesting. Is this probably the only night they can get away with?” I asked again.
“You know, this is your chance,” he said, glancing back and forth.
There I sat, halfway up a street sign, watching tens of thousands of New Yorkers bask in the glory of controlled chaos.
The New York Post published a sensational Instagram image this morning highlighting the 63 arrests, four stabbings, and one shooting reported across the city after the Knicks’ victory. There were images of fire and smoke in the background suggesting widespread mayhem, but that’s not exactly the situation I saw.
What I witnessed was a city liberated after a long-awaited cultural victory. With tens of thousands of New Yorkers pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior, the NYPD recognized that now was the time and focused on directing rather than quelling the chaos.
For years, New York has been portrayed by outsiders as a crime-ridden, declining city. And in the years since the killing of George Floyd and other deeply disturbing incidents, many Americans (myself included, of course) have come to view police officers through a similarly harsh lens.
As I was thinking about this, I passed a young black man in street clothes shaking the hand of an Irish police officer. The two had smiles on their faces and exchanged jokes before continuing on their separate ways.
A few minutes later, I climbed a stone wall in Greeley Square and sat next to a bronze eagle statue overlooking the crowd. After wandering the streets for hours, I felt it was the perfect place to take one last photo before heading back to the Upper East Side.
“Hey, you almost stepped on my head,” a voice barked from below.
I looked down. A man in his 20s wearing a blue Knicks jersey was staring back at me. I apologized. His face softened. “Okay.” he said. “Let’s go to the Knicks. That’s all that matters.”
After a moment of silence, he looked up again. “It’s a pretty nice view.”
