New York City

Karl-Anthony Towns with the Bob Cousy Trophy

It was 9:30 on a Friday morning when I got a text. The Knicks watch parties were going on sale at 10, one at Wollman Rink and one at Radio City Music Hall. The one inside the Garden had sold out a couple minutes after it went on sale. Game 5 was in San Antonio, and a watch party was the best thing we were going to get.

Blake was still asleep. I woke him up and said, “Blake, we’re buying tickets for the watch party. How many should we get?” I’d been to one before, for the Mets playoffs a few years ago, and discovered that the energy of the crowd is about 80% of what you get when the players are actually there. People cheered and booed and even yelled at umpires who were hundreds of miles away.

Blake rolled over and said, “I don’t want to go to a watch party. I just want to have some friends over.”

I felt the Knicks finals experience slipping away from me again. There was no way I could afford the astronomical prices of home games, and I wanted a way to experience this epic event. This was history, something that hadn’t happened in 53 years, and I kept finding ways to miss it.

Blake had his friends over for the game, including a Celtics fan they’d invited mostly to torture. You’ve got to love teenage boys. When the game ended they were going out the door. We called after them, “Don’t go too far. You can just go across the street to Lincoln Center. There will be people there.” Then we started going to bed. Right before I crawled in, I thought, “It would be nice to go outside.” Then I realized we were too old for that and went to sleep instead, which seemed a lot more our speed.

In the morning we found out the boys went well past Lincoln Center. They’d gone all the way to Times Square.

So I’d missed the watch party and slept through the celebration, but the ticker tape parade was Thursday morning, and I’d already made my peace with missing that too. I woke up early that day with a plan. The whole city was up. I was going to get in early, clear my inbox, and get things done. It was still going to be a great day.

I was riding my bike to work next to the West Side Highway when I made my turn onto 34th Street. Or at least I tried to. The whole highway was diverted and I couldn’t cross, and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized it was for the ticker tape parade. I walked my bike down 34th Street, through a series of police gates, showing my ID, still not sure what was going on. The street was pretty crowded. It would have made sense for 34th Street to be busy next to the Garden on a game night, but we were still a few avenues over, and the finals had ended.

I passed the entrance to my office and the crowd got really thick. People were standing on benches to see over each other, and there were some tour buses just sitting there. I figured they were taking people to view the parade.

After a while I turned to the person next to me and asked what was going on. “These are the buses that take the players to the parade,” they said. “We’re waiting to see the Knicks.”

I looked at my watch. It was 8:30. I didn’t need to be at work till nine. And really, what’s a better experience than waiting with a bunch of New Yorkers to catch a glimpse of the Knicks? So I stayed.

After ten minutes I was getting antsy. I had emails to answer and wanted to get my work done. The buses just sat there. Nobody around me seemed to know if anything was going to happen, or who’d come out already. Then a door opened and Coach Brown came out. He didn’t wave and duck into a bus. He bounced toward the barricades and ran the crowd like a pep rally. “Go New York, go New York, go!” Call and response. All of us cheering, strangers on benches and guys in bike helmets, at 8:30 on a Thursday morning.

Just as I was about to leave, Karl-Anthony Towns stepped out in a beautiful custom made orange and blue leather Knicks NBA Champions jacket, which looked even more impressive on his seven-foot frame. That’s the great thing about waiting for basketball players. They’re just taller and more physically impressive than everybody else. He was holding up a large crystal ball on a black and white base so we could all have our photo ops. It was the Bob Cousy Trophy, the award for the best regular-season record in the Eastern Conference.

For two weeks I’d tried to plan the perfect Knicks experience. In the end, what worked was simpler. I had an extra half hour, and when the opportunity showed up, I decided to spend it.

“What were you most excited about when you thought about coming to New York?” I asked.

“The snow,” she said. “Growing up in Singapore, I’d always see movies of the snow, but I’d never seen it in person. Tbe snow is always this beautiful white blanket that comes out and coats everything.”

“What disappointed you most about New York?” I said.

“Right after it snows, it turns into this big brown mush the next day.”

That’s how New York winters work. We get a whole lot of snow. It turns to mushy brown slop. Then it melts and goes away.

Except for this year.

This year, the snow fell and stayed. Not for a day or two, but for weeks. It piled up on the sides of the sidewalks and just sat there, like big white bumpers at the bowling alley. This is the type of thing that happens in places like Toronto. When we visited my sister early this year, I was surprised to see construction happening while it was snowing—because in Toronto in the winter, it’s always snowing.

It wasn’t just New York. Dallas closed schools for four days due to snow. Schools closed in Columbus and Chicago due to the cold. When the wind chill is -25 or below, schools close because it is simply too dangerous to walk to school or wait for a bus. The National Weather Service called one stretch of it an “epic, generational arctic outbreak.” Two hundred million people across the country were under some kind of cold-weather advisory at one point.

This was a real winter, the kind you see on ski mountains.

When it started to melt, this was like nothing I’d ever experienced. The closest reference point I had was the Great Thaw in the movie Frozen. In Scandinavia, where Frozen came from, the winter melt is a big thing. The winters there are long and genuinely dark, months where the sun barely shows up and the cold is something you live inside rather than pass through. Before Christianity arrived, Norse communities celebrated Dísablót, a festival marking the transition out of winter, a collective acknowledgment that the dark season was ending.

That’s what this felt like when the snow started to melt.

So I started taking pictures. I got some good ones, but I couldn’t really capture that feeling. What I really wanted was a time-lapse of the snow melting, and that wasn’t going to happen with my camera alone.

So I used Grok. I took an initial picture and told it what I wanted: “A time-lapse photograph of the snow melting throughout the day.” I had an image in my head of what that thaw looked like, the feeling of it, and I wanted to show someone else. I didn’t want to document the thaw. I wanted to express it. Grok gave me that, more or less, with a few gloriously wrong attempts along the way that you’ll see below.

There isn’t really a better tool for that right now.

The Great Thaw

The AI blooper reel is below.

There’s a surprising amount of water when the snow melts

The train station disappears halfway through the video.