For $100, you can buy a green-and-white “Knickerbocker Ave” street sign, and the city is betting the Knicks make you want one. NYC DOT dropped exactly 222 of the signs through CityStore on Wednesday morning, hours before the Knicks tipped off against the San Antonio Spurs in their first NBA Finals in nearly 30 years. One per customer, proceeds to the city’s general fund. The catch, if you are from here: the actual Knickerbocker Avenue is a working Bushwick commercial strip, and it is not about basketball.
The two share a name for the same reason, and it is not the Knicks. “Knickerbocker” traces back to the old Dutch New York of Washington Irving’s invented historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, which became the city’s nickname for itself. The basketball team borrowed it in 1946. The Bushwick avenue, like a lot of the city’s Dutch-flavored geography, had it long before. So a souvenir minted for a 2026 Finals run is really a slice of a street that has anchored Bushwick’s shopping district for generations.
That is the small, funny tension in the whole thing. Collectors anywhere can pay $100 for the name of a Bushwick block, and the money goes to the city’s general fund, not the block. The real Knickerbocker Avenue, meanwhile, keeps doing what it does: bodegas, discount stores, restaurants, the M train rumbling overhead, a Latino small-business corridor that the souvenir flattens into a logo. DOT has run these limited sign drops before, and they tend to sell out fast, so the scarcity is real even if the basketball link is mostly vibes.
If you wanted one, you are probably too late: the 222 signs, $100 each and one per customer, sold out fast through the city’s official CityStore. And if you would rather have the avenue than the aluminum, it is a short walk off the Knickerbocker Avenue stop on the M, where $100 buys a lot more than a sign.
Featured image: Courtesy NYC CityStore (a856-citystore.nyc.gov)
