New York City will celebrate the W.N.B.A.’s newest champions, the New York Liberty, on Thursday with a traditional ticker-tape parade in Lower Manhattan.
Over the decades, many a feat has been celebrated along the Canyon of Heroes, a stretch of Broadway between Bowling Green and City Hall. Astronauts, presidents and championship sports teams have all been honored with parades along the route. The New York Yankees have marched through nine times, the New York Mets three times and the New York Giants once.
But the parade for the Liberty’s first-ever championship win will be only the third time a women’s sports team has been granted the privilege. The U.S. Women’s National Team in soccer was the first, marching in 2015 and in 2019 after winning the Women’s World Cup. Gotham F.C., the area’s N.W.S.L. team, won the league championship last year, but the team was not given a parade.
The only parade to have taken place since the 2019 World Cup celebration was held for essential workers, to mark their contributions to the city during the pandemic. Hundreds of nurses and health care workers, transit and sanitation workers, cooks and teachers marched along the route on July 7, 2021, with a modest audience looking on.
The parade honoring the Liberty is likely to draw bigger crowds. It is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. in Battery Park, according to the city, and will travel north to City Hall, where a ceremony will take place. The streets surrounding the parade route will be closed to traffic, and R and W subway trains will skip the City Hall station on Thursday, according to the business improvement group for the area, the Downtown Alliance.
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