Mechanical brooms, collection trucks and backpack blowers were all part of Thursday’s aggressive effort by the city’s Department of Sanitation to clean and reopen streets quickly in Lower Manhattan, soon after the Knicks’ historic parade up the Canyon of Heroes had ended.

DSNY Commissioner Gregory Anderson said while his department plans for big events all year long, this particular parade was harder to predict since the agency didn’t know if it would be thousands or millions of fans showing up.

“I was out there walking up and down Broadway all afternoon,” Anderson said, “and saw just how much the mechanical brooms were sucking up, how much our teams were sweeping off the sidewalk into the street, and it was really remarkable.”

Anderson said it was similar to tactics used for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and for Times Square’s New Year’s celebration. Workers used leaf blowers, rakes and other equipment to get coffee cups, ticker tape and other trash off the sidewalk and into the street so that it could we swept up by a machine and sent on its way.

In total, 70 sanitation supervisors and 650 sanitation workers were part of Thursday’s effort, which saw some crews in place as early as Wednesday night at every part of the parade route, ready to respond minutes after the last float.

“There’s that old cartoon where you have a parade,” Anderson said, "and you have a guy with the trash can and a broom goes behind it and cleans up. That’s literally what it looked like."

“Sanitation did a great job,” said Sameer Munye, who flew in from Portland, Oregon, to try to attend the parade. “I seen them working right after the parade. They got straight to it. I respect it.”

“We would think, ‘Oh it’s all going to be clean by tomorrow,’” said Knicks fan Amin Dogo. “They cleaned in the next hour, hour and a half!”

“It looks spotless as if I was here for the first time and nothing had happened,” said Knicks fan Nate Chetram, “but the fact that there was a parade here a couple of hours ago, it looks like this. Props to them!”

The Department of Sanitation said staffing levels for cleanup efforts will continue to be greater than usual through the end of the weekend, as fans continue to go out to celebrate.