The New York City marathon route is changing. Here’s what’s different.
By JENNIE COUGHLIN
For the first time since 2011, the New York City Marathon course is changing. Runners at this year’s race Nov. 1 will travel a slightly different route in the Bronx to minimize the impact on Mott Haven residents and reduce the number of turns the marathoners take.
The Bronx section of the race is just over a mile long, but until this year it had seven turns. The change cuts that to five.
The course until now had looped around a block that includes a Western Beef supermarket and a 24-hour laundromat on East 140th Street, cutting off those businesses from cars and complicating routes for pedestrians there for most of the day.
Marathoners would run up Morris Avenue, make a left onto East 140th Street — around the supermarket parking lot — and take another left turn onto Rider Avenue. That route meant residents of the Patterson public housing complex, which has almost 1,800 units and sits on the opposite side of Morris Avenue from the businesses, could not easily access them during the race.
“This is our only supermarket,” said Jennifer Alicea, 48, who has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years. “The laundromat, same thing.” She said that, on race day, “everybody just knows to stay out of the way” and called it “a real inconvenience.”
Starting this year, the runners will stay on Alexander Avenue and head north past 138th Street, where the course has turned left in past years. Runners continue up to 141st Street, then turn left onto Third Avenue. Then, when the runners turn right onto 138th Street heading south, they can head straight over the Madison Avenue Bridge back into Manhattan instead of having to loop up and around the supermarket block.
Restoring access to the businesses was the main reason for shifting the course, said Ted Metellus, the chief event production officer and race director for New York Road Runners, which puts on the marathon. Metellus said the neighborhood had become more residential, which changed the impact. The organization worked with the city and the community to discuss alternatives ahead of the required course recertification this year.
“I had some sensitivities to that because those sections of the Bronx are food deserts,” said Metellus, who grew up in the borough. He also noted that since the race is on a Sunday, people were more likely to be running errands at those locations.
On Saturday afternoon, there was a steady stream of pedestrians and people arriving in cars to both the grocery store and laundromat.
Dante Williams, 45, normally drives to the laundromat from the Fordham neighborhood in the Bronx, since it has parking. On race day, he has to park on a different block. “I got two giant bags,” he said, describing how he would have to wait for a gap in the runners and then dash across the course, lugging his laundry with him.
The change, which happens between mile 20 and 21, was one of two options the organization presented to the city and Police Department, which had to approve the change. Metellus said the group pushed to get it done for this year’s race, which is the 50th anniversary of the five-borough version of the marathon. From 1970 to 1975, the course was four-plus loops of Central Park.
In 1976, the course used the same two bridges to enter and exit the Bronx, but just did “a quick loop around a light pole,” Metellus said. After that first year, he said, the Bronx borough president requested that race organizers change the route to add more distance in that borough.
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