On June 14, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan filled up for the 69th National Puerto Rican Day Parade, the big one. But Brooklyn had its own version that day, a borough away, on Knickerbocker Avenue.
Bushwick held its 8th Annual Knickerbocker Avenue Puerto Rican Day Parade on the same day, free, stepping off at 3 p.m. down the neighborhood’s main commercial strip. It is smaller than the Fifth Avenue spectacle, and deliberately so. It runs past the bodegas and businesses where the people marching live and shop, and it turns Knickerbocker into a block party rather than a televised event.
It drew a crowd this year. Mayor Zohran Mamdani turned up, and so did Jose Alvarado, the Knicks guard and Brooklyn native. On Knickerbocker, that hometown turnout carries more weight than a celebrity on Fifth Avenue. A sitting mayor and a hometown NBA player turning out in the neighborhood says something about whose community counts.
The parade was part of a wider Boricua weekend across north Brooklyn. In Williamsburg, the New York City Puerto Rican Heritage foundation and the Puerto Rican Bar Association held a heritage reception at Pacha on June 11, honoring community leaders and business owners including Toñita, also known as María Antonia Cay. Puerto Rican Brooklyn is not a memory, even as the rents try to make it one.
North Brooklyn’s Puerto Rican community has been pushed and priced out for a generation. The free parade on Knickerbocker and the reception in a gentrifying Williamsburg are ways of holding ground. They say, we are still here.
If you missed it this year, mark the Knickerbocker Avenue parade for next June. In the meantime, spend money at the Knickerbocker Avenue businesses that host it and show up for the community that throws it.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily image
