As an estimated two million people gathered near City Hall in sheer jubilation on June 18 to celebrate the New York Knicks’ championship, Jonathan Marc Hicks Jr. and Caitlin Morgan Remington joined the chaos, wearing a black suit and a white wedding gown and veil.
They were married at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau, in the thick of the action downtown, while the star players Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns paraded up Broadway to City Hall Plaza.
Two Knicks fans that the couple met had just bought a bottle of tequila and poured shots for them. One reveler stopped to tell them, jokingly, “Look at all the people that came to your wedding.” A cyclist took a Polaroid photo of the couple and handed it to them as a present.
“I felt like it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Hicks said. But it also felt like “exposure therapy.”
The couple, two serious introverts, had scheduled their wedding appointment months in advance, opting for a courthouse wedding to attract as little attention as possible. To them, the idea of a large celebration with dozens of eyes on them was mortifying.
So when they found out the Sunday before their wedding that the Knicks parade would be held on the same day and in the same area as their marriage ceremony, they considered rescheduling. But appointments were booked for the next three weeks.
Hicks and Remington, who live in Manhattan’s Financial District near the start of the parade route, walked for half an hour through hordes of revelers since several train stations along the parade route were shut down. When they arrived at the Marriage Bureau, it was surprisingly calm inside. Hicks and Remington, both wedding photographers, have captured their fair share of City Hall ceremonies. Now, it was their turn.
By the time they said “I do,” the parade had reached City Hall, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivered the basketball team a ceremony of their own. It was very crowded outside, and the plan was to find a quiet place and take photos there. But, in the elation of having just tied the knot, the couple decided to immerse themselves in the gaggle of blue and orange.
“We kind of saw the crowds and how exciting it was,” Remington said, and decided to lean into it and celebrate — both their union and the championship — with the city. They walked straight into the crowd and shouted, “Let’s go Knicks!” with fans who stopped to congratulate them.
“People were taking photos with us, like we were the Knicks,” Remington said.
Hicks, 33, grew up in Pamplico, S.C. He earned a bachelor’s degree in health care administration from Francis Marion University in Florence, S.C.
Remington, 29, grew up in Manassas, Va. She graduated from Longwood University in Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and a master’s degree in special education.
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The couple met on Instagram in early 2022 through mutual friends in the wedding photography industry. Remington was living in Tysons, Va., and Hicks was in Brooklyn. In February 2023, she asked him if he would be available to shoot a wedding with her in Leesburg, Va., after an assistant canceled at the last minute. For Hicks, who had developed a romantic interest in her, it was a no-brainer.
When they met in person for the shoot, Remington said she felt a sense of comfort. “He was really fun and outgoing,” she said. “And so him bringing out a little bit of that in me was really fun for me to experience.”
The next day, Hicks returned to New York. They messaged and FaceTimed often. “I was fully invested at that point,” he said. Hicks and Remington, who works full time as a special-education teacher, bonded over capturing human connection and emotion in wedding photography.
After a few visits to New York, where they walked along the East River and tried new coffee shops and museums, Remington moved to Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn, five blocks away from Hicks’s apartment, in July 2023. And in January 2024, they moved to the Financial District together.
Hicks said he knew early on that he wanted to marry her: “It’s just the world telling you, ‘This is what you’re meant to do. This is who your person is. And you should spend the rest of your life with her,’” he said.
In August 2025, he proposed in Laguna Beach, Calif., during a work trip.
On June 15, the couple held a celebration with seven family members, including Hicks’s 9-year-old son, in Fort Greene Park, where they read a poem out loud to each other.
Three days later, on June 18, they were married by Jenny Mendez, a city clerk. As for the thrill of the parade, Hicks said, “I just can’t believe that is what we got to have as our legal wedding day.”
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