Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday that the city will give away 600 tickets for the City Hall ceremony honoring the Knicks after Thursday’s parade, which is slated to start at 10 a.m. in the Canyon of Heroes.
More than 347,000 New Yorkers entered the public lottery for the ceremony; the city said a total of 300 people will receive two tickets each. Millions are expected to pack the Canyon of Heroes for a celebration after the Knicks ended a 53-year title drought during their playoff run.
Security and access will be tight. All attendees will be screened and no bags will be allowed at the parade. The NYPD is assigning more than 10,000 members, including heavy weapons teams and explosive-detection K9s, plus transportation, transit, highway, aviation and drone units.
Ceremony attendees will also be screened. The team will receive the ceremonial Key to the City — a new design that replaces the city seal with an apple — and James Dolan said Alicia Keys will perform live during the ceremony.
Logistics begin Wednesday night. Starting at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, parking will not be allowed south of Canal Street and cars left in the area will be towed. On Thursday, beginning at 7 a.m., south of Canal will be shut to vehicular traffic from the Hudson River to the East River; the FDR and West Side Highway will remain open. Traffic coming off the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan will be routed northbound on the FDR only.
Transit operations will change as well: the Wall Street and City Hall subway stations will be closed starting at 4:30 a.m. on Thursday until the celebrations end, and Staten Island Ferry service will be increased to run every 15 minutes.
The sheer scale of interest — 347,000 applicants for 600 ceremony tickets — is the event’s clearest friction. The city has not explained who will receive the 600 tickets or how the lottery winners were selected, even as it confirms that those inside City Hall will face the same screening rules applied at the parade.
The immediate next steps are simple and public: the parade begins Thursday at 10 a.m., followed by the City Hall ceremony. What remains unresolved and likely to drive public reaction is the unanswered question of who, among hundreds of thousands of applicants, will actually get one of those 600 seats and by what process they were chosen.
