Madison Square Garden will serve over 60,000 eligible voters

New York Knicks/Twitter

Madison Square Garden, which has been close since March due to the pandemic, has found a new use: the election day site.

“Madison Square Garden is thrilled to support our community by partnering with the New York Electoral Council to serve as an election site for residents to exercise their right to vote in the upcoming general election,” the New York Knicks tweeted Friday.

The announcement came hours after an agreement made earlier in the day between NBA players and the league commissioner to resume playoff games on Saturday after teams boycotted the series to protest police shooting of a unarmed black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wis. during the weekend.

Part of the deal to restart the games includes the conversion of arena properties across the country into voting venues.

But a spokeswoman for the New York DOE said her agency worked with Garden to make the venue a polling site “for weeks.”

MSG will open its doors to voters on both November election day and early voters starting October 24.

The venue, which bills itself as “the most famous arena in the world,” will serve over 60,000 eligible Manhattan voters, making it the largest polling site in the city, according to a press release posted on the Garden website.