When the Garden Was Eden

“Brilliant . . . smartly written, featuring tons of interviews with the Knicks of the Phil Jackson-Clyde-Reed era.” — New York Magazine

“Harvey Araton has evocatively rendered the team that New York never stops pining for—the OldKnicks. More than a nostalgic chronicle . . . it’s a portrait of a group of proud, idiosyncratic men andthe city that needed them." — Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx isBurning

In the tradition of The Boys of Summer and The Bronx Is Burning, New York Times sports columnistHarvey Araton delivers a fascinating look at the 1970s New York Knicks—part autobiography, partsports history, part epic, set against the tumultuous era when Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, and Bill Bradleyreigned supreme in the world of basketball.

The late 1960s and early 1970s, in New York City and America at large, were years marked by political tumult, social unrest . . . and the best professional basketball ever played. Paradise, for better or worse, was a hardwood court in midtown Manhattan.

Harvey Araton has followed the Knicks, old and new, for decades—first as a teenage fan, then as a young sports reporter with the New York Post, and now as a writer and columnist for the New York Times. When the Garden Was Eden is the definitive account of the New York Knicks in their vintage pomp. With measured prose and shoe-leather reporting, Araton relives their most glorious triumphs and bitter rivalries, and casts light on a team all but forgotten outside of pregame highlight reels and nostalgic reunions at the Garden.

Araton’s revealing story of the Knicks’ heyday is far more than a review of one of basketball’s greatest teams’ inspiring story—it is, at heart, a stirring recreation of a time and place when the NBA championships defined the national dream.