The New York City Marathon isn’t just one of the world’s great sports events. It’s much more. The first five-borough marathon in 1976 helped to reinvent cities, and what we think of them.
The mid-1970s were dark days for cities. In 1975, aides to then-New York City Mayor Abe Beame held a number of closed-door meetings with him. They wanted to be sure Beame was fully prepped for the dreaded day when he would have to announce the New York City's bankruptcy.
New York didn’t have just a fiscal problem. It had an image problem as well. Waves of news stories reported on the the city’s seemingly endless garbage, crime, and social woes.
Other cities around the world weren’t faring much better. Civilization had been built on the back of cities, but many appeared to be crumbling. No one wanted to live in a city, or even to visit. The place to be was in the green-laced suburbs. Cities tottered on the edge of extinction, like relics of a bygone era.
A year later New York City organized the first truly urban marathon, touring through the city’s five boroughs. Previous versions of the New York City Marathon, from 1970-1975, had circled Central Park four times. Other road races were held on little-traveled country roads where traffic wasn’t an issue. Even the original Athens Olympic Marathon of 1896 and the first Boston Marathon of 1897 followed country byways for 80 percent of the distance before dipping down into the urban centers.
It was the way running was. Running didn’t happen in cities; driving cars happened in cities.
The 1976 New York City Marathon was such a novel event that no one had any idea if it would work. And there were plenty of reasons to be dubious. “I just wanted to see how the police would clear the streets,” said Frank Shorter, Running Shoes - Gear.
Even the man who dreamed up the five-borough tour, George Spitz, expressed amazement over how completely New Yorkers supported the marathon. He was one of the 2,002 nervous starters on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. “When I came off the bridge and entered Bay Ridge, there were crowds of cheering people,” Spitz recently told George Hirsch in a The Best 1 Mile Races to Add to Your Calendar reminiscence. “The first five-borough New York City Marathon was a game changer.”
So were many others. In fact, the 1976 New York City Marathon went so smoothly, and the city looked so sparkling on international TV, that other world cities soon followed suit. In 1979 England’s Chris Brasher, a pacer in Roger Bannister’s sub-4:00 mile and winner of the 1956 Olympic 3000-meter steeplechase, completed the New York City Marathon. He famously reported back to London’s newspaper readers:
"To believe this story you must believe that the human race can be one joyous family, working together, laughing together, achieving the impossible. I believe it because I saw it happen. Last Sunday in one of the most trouble-stricken cities of the world, 11,532 men, women and children from 40 countries of the world, assisted by one million black, white and yellow people, Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, Buddhists and Confucians, laughed, cheered and suffered during the greatest folk festival the world has seen. “
That’s how the London Marathon got launched. Before long, great European cities like Berlin, Rome, and Paris joined the parade, soon to be joined by untold other major cities around the globe. A decade ago, it was said that you rarely saw another runner in Tokyo, and that the Japanese only cared about small, elite, made-for-TV marathon competitions.
Now the Tokyo Marathon, launched in 2007, has joined the World Marathon Majors (Boston, New York, Chicago, London, Berlin, Tokyo), and reportedly receives more than 300,000 entry applications. That’s a powerful demonstration of what an urban marathon can achieve.
If a city hosts a big marathon, it also has to give it citizens more places to run, walk, and bike. Parks flourished in the cities, and bike paths, and bike rentals, and miracles like New York’s High Line.
A city looks different on foot than from a speeding car. It has a friendlier, more human scale. Cities look especially different when you run them in an urban marathon. First, you feel strong and powerful when you take over the streets with your fellow runners. Second, you sense a kinship with the cheering crowds--and they with you--as your travel from neighborhood to neighborhood to glorious finish line.
Cities have enjoyed a renaissance in the last 40 years. Many forces, from demographics to the environment, have fueled this rebirth. Urban marathons, and city running in general, have played a role. They’ve helped us see that clean air, clean water, healthy living, and vibrant options belong together.
The 1976 New York City Marathon was the catalyst for all the urban marathons that have followed. It’s an important point to remember on Sunday as you watch another unfolding of this amazing, almost impossible, still-hard-to-believe event.
