Longtime New York City Marathon runners will notice a slight change in the course near mile 20 of this year’s race as the field will be diverted along an altered path to allow residents in the Bronx to get better access to a supermarket and other business directly in the path of the event.
The change was revealed on Tuesday and will be the first time in 15 years that the race will get some form of modification.
Previously, the course previously looped around East 140th Street near Morris Avenue and made crossing over to enter a supermarket and laundromat particularly difficult for residents for more than half of the day on race day.
With the new route, which avoids the businesses, runners face fewer turns as they approach the final 10 kilometers of the race and re-enter Manhattan via the Madison Avenue Bridge.
The area of the Bronx where the marathon passes is located in Mott Haven and the portion that will be modified was across the street from the Patterson Houses which is a 15-building complex with nearly 1,800 apartments. There are several smaller buildings along that part of the course that contain businesses like auto body shops, but in recent years, the area has seen a boom in residential construction.
Along the new route, runners will head north on Alexander Avenue, turn on 141st Street and then onto Third Avenue and make its final turn in The Bronx on 138th Street and then west over the Major Deegen Expressway as the overpass feeds into the Madison Avenue Bridge.
Once runners reach the bridge back into Manhattan, they turn south on Fifth Avenue and continue the final stretch of the race, which is around five miles.
The Bronx section of the marathon is just over a mile and feeds into Mott Haven from the Willis Avenue Bridge, which connects East Harlem from First Avenue in Manhattan. When the race was expanded out of Central Park to include all five boroughs in 1976, the Bronx portion was shorter but still used both bridges as entry and exit points to and from Manhattan but later modified to include more of the borough.
Meanwhile, this year’s marathon will commemorate 50 years of the park as an all-city race as it acknowledges the efforts of Ted Corbitt, George Hirsch, Fred Lebow, George Spitz and Percy Sutton and their individual roles in pushing for the event to stretch into a massive celebration of running.
