KNICKS IN FIVE

For one night, the greatest party was on the streets of New York City

My friends in New York have been telling me that Dimes Square is cooked—that last little triangle in lower Manhattan where you could fuck around and catch a vibe is now running on ashy fumes like a bong that’s been cashed. I was told that the outdoor tables by Clandestino where Eckhaus-clad art hos used to get drunk have been conquered by the Alo Yoga legginged legions riding the final stop on the gentrification train. That lunch-hour lines around the block for average but affordable sushi is now a common symptom of pervasive economic strain. “Everything has been captured by venture,” bemoaned a friend who worked in finance, “You were smart to move to LA.” But people are always lamenting the last days of downtown New York, and how its weirdness has been cannibalized into a pseudo-artisanal version of the generic urban lifestyle—a flattened and homogenized culture that my friend Kenric calls “Big Mid.” Let me just say that during my latest trip into the NYC vortex, I didn’t discover some obscure new subcultural niche fermenting under the surface of the city; instead, the algorithmic sameness broke open and revealed something more alive: New York is truly dead only when it stops having the capacity to surprise me.

Day one in the vortex I stood at the intersection of the Bushwick hellmouth, the other notorious triangle of outsized hype and disrepute. The subway screeched overhead, and Paradise Garage-era disco tunes blasted out of the corner store’s stereo—at least some things haven’t changed. An elderly Black man shuffled down Broadway, skirting close to the wall like a hunched shadow, then turned to me as if he were to ask for something, and instead shouted “KNICKS IN FIVE!” with such vigor that the force landed in my stomach and erupted as glee.

KNICKS IN FIVE

KNICKS IN FIVE

KNICKS IN FIVE

The whole city chanting this to each other in the week leading up to game five of the NBA finals, until it takes the form of a mantra, a spell, a hyperstition. New York is a city so convinced of its self-importance that it becomes possible to believe in the magic of manifestation—hope pooling into a collective will seeking to bend reality into desired fate, the ego strutting in saying WE WILL WIN.

Knicks bagels, L'Industrie bootleg merch, Tom in a DIY Knicks shirt, viewing party at Montez

When Saturday night rolls around everyone starts scrambling, a flurry of texts asking WHERE U WATCHING THE GAME? Dusty old sports bars are suddenly standing room only; Spike Lee’s neighborhood turned into an impromptu block party; delis switched their screens to the game instead of showing pictures of paninis. Plans get changed and diverted last minute as groups scramble for a good view of a TV screen anywhere with air conditioning. Earlier that afternoon I’d popped into the final hours of a post-apocalyptic rave called Function, and some of the girls were still carrying. But for once the seduction of the afters kiki—that sense of secluding oneself into a private garden of soft debauchery—had no appeal to me, not when there was the possibility of witnessing history.

I got a text from my Montez Press Radio home that the station has moved out of Dimes Square and is hosting a screening party at their new location—a gargantuan loft acquired through the dubious largesse of the city. The vibe is giving guestlist-only: it’s BYOB, close friends only, don’t roll up with a posse. As I walk through Nolita towards the spot the streets are awash in blue and orange, everyone wearing Knicks regalia ranging from official gear to homemade versions to bootlegs copped from street vendors. Even the famous pizza spot where we stopped for a slice pulled a lewk. This outpouring of grassroots support contrasts with the World Cup, which is happening simultaneously, but seems to be promoted primarily through expensive subway ads. Still, has New York, a city ruled by fashion girls and fabulous gays, ever cared this much about jocks?

Me and the fabulous Matthew Donovan at the Knicks viewing party

Something’s in the air lately with sports, do you feel this? My theory is that the spirit of the game has subbed in for the wider gentility we are missing, sportsmanship standing in for the sense of virtue, unity, and discipline that’s lacking on the world stage. Maybe athletic feats of the body—superhuman acts that defy the limitations of our shared meat sacks—is one of the last pure experiences of transcendence that we have left. Acts of heroic achievement on the court and in the field restore the eroding trust that greatness can be achieved through talent and hard work alone. I used to see obsessive sports team loyalty as a lame form of tribalist identity akin to nationalism, but in these hopelessly polarized times, cheering for a side evokes a feeling of communal belonging that’s increasingly hard to find. You gotta believe in something—why not believe in the Knicks?

Still, I have to admit that I had no idea what the fuck was going on in the game. As I squinted at the TV screen, I couldn’t even make out the ball moving, it had disappeared into the flashing elbows and free throws. Instead my attention drifted to the nauseating sights of Timothee Chalamet, Taylor Swift, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry David—a roll call of the most annoying celebrities in the world. In the end, following the ball didn’t really matter, because the only thing I cared about was the intensity of feeling.

I recently read something about the power of spectacle in a book about spirituality in Bali. Unlike the classic western dichotomy that wages a war between good and evil, in the Balinese world view, both of these qualities are constant and integral—and at a deeper level, the distinction between the two loses its coherence. To the Balinese, it doesn’t matter greatly if things are good or bad, the book said, the most important thing is how strongly they are felt. I feel the same way about sports: it’s less about the rules of engagement than the strength of the moment.

I was smoking a cigarette on the fire escape when the game reached its nail-biting final act. The Knicks were trailing behind until they were suddenly not, bouncing back in the final moments to tie with the San Antonio Spurs at a score of 88:88, angels laughing overhead. The clock counted down split seconds, starting and stopping, time stretching psychedelically to contain entire lifetimes of single-minded pursuit. Years of training boiled down to pure instinct as sneakers squeaked against the floor to the crowd’s anguished roar. It was like a cruel metaphor for life: you can spend your whole life working towards a dream, and it all boils down to not cracking at a crucial moment—how well you can move in this post-rational space of fluidity that’s the result of training encoded in the body. Like I said, the technicalities were over my head, so I just watched the scores flipping up as the clock ticked down, until the whole room was standing on their feet, necks elongated like giraffes towards the screen. It felt like the whole block was holding its breath until the moment popped into victory, then immediately everything went berserk, people jumping in circles and sticking their heads out of the window to bellow into the wind, fireworks crackling against the blue and orange Empire State Building.

Everyone quickly ran downstairs to join the collective gush flowing into the streets in jubilation, afraid to miss the action—a silly fear, since the partying would go on all night into morning. My partner and I hopped on bikes and tried to make it up to Madison Square Garden, where thousands of people had gathered for a watch party, and on the way we passed people clamboring on buses, riding the roofs of their cars, climbing on street poles, endless trains of high-fives and samba dances, vans tricked out with disco balls and Knicks flags—everywhere a delightful and chaotic scene. By 14th street, the bike lanes got too crowded with people to move safely in, so we got off and walked through Flatiron, where the fratty bros and West Village girls that are typically my enemies temporarily became my kin—their aggro chest thumping and drunk “whoo!” screaming adding vigor to the cathartic churn.

After 23rd street it became impossible to push on further, the crowd was just too thick, and gazing up Broadway I could see the sea of people rippling all the way to the glowing aura hovering over Times Square. So we detoured to Washington Square Park, where strangers helped me lift my bike over the toppled police barricades, as we all streamed towards the fountain in the middle of that park that had been emptied of water, and turned into a mosh pit—hundreds of people crowded in, blasting music, dancing to “Empire State of Mind, the Knicks’ unofficial anthem, for the tenth time.

Experiencing the city like this reminded me of reverse Hurricane Sandy or the opposite of 9/11—everyone unified in an experience of triumph instead of devastation. “So often, when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to, by a moment of tragedy or adversity,” Mayor Mamdani would later say. “What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy.”

On Knicks night, New York was the greatest party: strangers locked eyes and limbs, the city’s friction and chaos was electrifying, and you didn’t need to be a knowing member of a niche scene to get swept up in the good feeling. Dimes Square might be washed, but the choking claustrophobia of the hyper-capitalist rat race was suspended by a reminder that the streets of this Big Mid billionaire playground are still ours to take. For a few rowdy hours, it was a glimpse of the social solidarity so lacking in our losing fight against the technocrats and corporations, a sniff of the revolution that’s yet to come.

In the fountain mosh pit, the banker high fived the bus driver, and even if this unity was sort of an illusion, or what the socialists call a manufactured distraction, for this moment it was the fantasy we needed.