The Most Unconventional Way to Watch the Knicks Parade Is Also the Most New York
New York City is no stranger to ticker-tape parades. The Canyon of Heroes has welcomed astronauts, World Series champions, and returning war heroes. But the 2025 New York Knicks NBA championship parade is already shaping up to be one for the ages—and not just because the Knicks finally have a title to celebrate. This time, fans who can't squeeze onto the packed streets of Lower Manhattan have a truly unique way to watch the festivities unfold: through the city's own network of traffic surveillance cameras, livestreamed by a local artist with a flair for repurposing urban infrastructure into public art.
Artist Morry Kolman has become something of a cult figure in New York's art and tech communities for doing exactly this. And for this parade, he's doing it again—this time with the quiet blessing of the New York City Department of Transportation, which previously pushed back on his work. Here's everything you need to know about how to tune in, why this project matters, and what makes it such a perfectly strange New York way to experience a historic moment.
Who Is Morry Kolman and What Is He Actually Doing?
Morry Kolman is a New York-based artist whose work sits at the intersection of surveillance culture, urban infrastructure, and public access. Rather than painting canvases or sculpting bronze, Kolman turns the city's own eyes back on itself. His medium is the hundreds of traffic cameras the NYC Department of Transportation uses to monitor congestion, accidents, and the general chaos of city streets.
For the Knicks parade, Kolman is aggregating and livestreaming feeds from these cameras positioned along the parade route. The result is a multi-angle, real-time broadcast of the celebration that feels nothing like a polished television production—and that's entirely the point. The footage is grainy, wide-angle, and stripped of commentary. It's the city watching itself celebrate.
What makes this iteration particularly notable is the city's response. In the past, the NYC Department of Transportation pushed back against Kolman's use of these feeds, raising questions about the limits of public data access and the unofficial broadcasting of official infrastructure. This time, however, the department is not demanding he stop. That shift in posture—from friction to tolerance—signals something meaningful about how New York is beginning to think about public data, civic tech, and creative reuse of government-owned systems.
How to Watch the Knicks Parade Through NYC Traffic Cameras
Watching the parade through Kolman's stream is straightforward, and you don't need any special software or subscriptions. Here's how to access the feed:
- Follow Morry Kolman's social media channels and website, where he typically posts direct links to his active livestreams ahead of major events. He has established a presence across platforms and usually announces stream links in the hours before an event begins.
- The NYC Department of Transportation's own public-facing traffic camera portal—NYC Traffic—also makes many of these feeds publicly accessible. You can visit nyc.gov/dot and navigate to the traffic camera section to explore individual camera feeds positioned along Broadway and the surrounding streets in Lower Manhattan.
- Check local New York media outlets and arts publications, which have covered Kolman's work extensively and often share direct links when he goes live for major city events.
- Social platforms including YouTube and Twitch have hosted his streams in the past, so searching his name on those platforms in real time may surface the active broadcast.
The stream typically goes live well before the parade begins, giving viewers a chance to watch crowds gather, streets close, and the city transform into a celebration zone in real time.
Why This Matters Beyond the Parade Itself
It would be easy to dismiss Kolman's project as a novelty—a quirky way to watch a parade for people who couldn't get a spot on Broadway. But the implications of what he's doing reach further than that.
Cities like New York operate vast networks of surveillance infrastructure that the public largely funds but rarely engages with directly. Traffic cameras, license plate readers, and pedestrian monitoring systems generate enormous amounts of visual data every single day. That data is used by city agencies for operational purposes, but it almost never flows back to the public in any meaningful, human way. Kolman's work inverts that dynamic. By surfacing these feeds and framing them as something worth watching—as art, as civic participation, as shared experience—he asks a pointed question: who does this infrastructure belong to?
The NYC Department of Transportation's decision not to interfere this time suggests that question is no longer purely rhetorical. There is growing recognition, at least implicitly, that publicly operated camera systems capturing publicly owned streets exist in a complicated space between government property and public commons.
The Knicks Parade Route and What the Cameras Will Show
The ticker-tape parade is set to travel through the Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan, the traditional route for New York's championship celebrations. The route runs along Broadway from Battery Park northward, with confetti raining down from the office towers that line one of the most iconic corridors in American sports history.
The traffic cameras positioned along and around this route will capture wide-angle views of the crowd, the floats, and the players as they make their way through the city. While the perspective won't offer the close-up glamour of a television broadcast, it provides something arguably more authentic: the unfiltered texture of a city going absolutely wild for its basketball team.
A Championship Moment, Seen Through the City's Own Eyes
The New York Knicks winning the NBA championship is the kind of event that generations of fans convinced themselves might never come. For a fanbase that has endured decades of heartbreak, near-misses, and organizational dysfunction, a ticker-tape parade down Broadway is nothing short of cathartic.
Watching that parade through traffic cameras—grainy, undramatic, oddly intimate—feels right for a city that has always had a complicated relationship with its own mythology. New York doesn't need a glossy broadcast to tell it what it is. Sometimes a surveillance feed is enough. Thanks to Morry Kolman, the city is watching itself write history, one camera at a time.