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Photo by Jay Brady
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George Spitz, left, had the idea for a five-borough marathon and
Abe Beame was the mayor who gave the okay.
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Invention is the mother of an eventual necessity to explain. Just
how could anyone have believed, 20 years ago, in the possibility of running a
26-mile, 385-yard footrace through the streets of New York City's five
boroughs?
"Why did I think it would work?" repeated George Spitz,
widely credited with the five-borough idea, "Because Ted Corbitt said it
would work. He told me it was technically feasible."
And why did Corbitt, himself a veteran of 199 marathon races,
think it was feasible? "Actually, they pulled off a miracle," he
said. Up until then, the New York City Marathon had been run entirely within
Central Park, with four repeated loops.
Corbitt, now a 76-year-old retired physical therapist who intends
to walk this year's marathon on Sunday, offered to send himself on daily runs
through Brooklyn and Queens in early 1976, scouting the "least traffic-
laden areas." With the aid of fellow runner Harry Murphy -- "Harry
had a car," Corbitt said -- and his own bicycle equiped with "old
instruments to measure the course," Corbitt helped map out a couple of
possible routes.
Marathon maestro Fred Lebow, cocreator of the race when it
debuted in the park in 1970, persuadcd two-time Olympic medalist Frank
Shorter to run New York in '76, in a sort of five-borough showdown with
America's other big-name marathoncr. Bill Rodgers. Hardly convinced that such
an ambitious project would work, Shorter said that he "just wanted to
show up and see how the police would clear the streets. That alone would be
an accomplishment."
Two thousand and eighty-nine others showed up with Shorter
--almost four times the number who had participated in the park the
year before. One thousand, five hundred and forty-nine finished.
Somehow, they reinvented the wheel that day,
"It's a mystery!" said Brian Crawford, the veteran New
York Road Runners Club adminstrator whose title was "race
coordinator" in 1976. "It's one of the great mysteries of all time.
And no one wants to take credit for it!"
Spitz, then working as state auditor, confirmed that he had gone
to Percy Sutton, then Manhattan borough president, with the five-borough
proposal. But Spitz humbly added that "Harry Murphy had thought of the
idea years before. Harry is dead now; he was a runner who finished third in
the Queens Marathon in 1948."
In that '48 marathon, runners had started at Idlewild Airport
(now JFK) on Queens' south shore and worked their way north to the World's
Fair grounds in Flushing Meadows.
Anyway, Sutton, now chairman emeritus of Inner City Broadcasting,
recalled that the five-borough brainstorm was appealing because "it
would carry the race through every ethnic neighborhood, to every ethnic group
in New York."
Sutton saw it as a grand cultural parade, and even hoped to have
vendors selling various ethnic foods at the finish line (a specific detail
that never evolved). So Sutton brought the five-borough proposal to then-
mayor Abe Beame, confident that Beame would go along "because Abe was a
good guy."
Corbitt said that one possible route, from the start on the
Staten Island side of the Verrazano Bridge, placed the finish in the Columbus
Circle area on the southwest corner of Central Park; the other at the United
Nations on Midtown's east side. Eventually, a Central Park finish, near the
Tavern on the Green Restaurant, was picked. There were early plans to run
into Manhattan on the Triboro Bridge, before settling on the 59th Street
Bridge.
With the perfect hindsight of 20 years, Beame, who said that
"the nearest I came to running a marathon was on the 100-pound relay
[sic] team at the High School of Commerce," benignly praised Sutton and
Jack Rudin, a civic booster from the city's most notable family real estate
business and said, "I just thought it would be a nice thing for New York
City."
"We didn't know all the things it would require."
Sutton said. "Police, sanitation and so forth. But I'd never seen any
organizational structure work so well."
To which Allan Steinfeld, then Lebow's right-hand man and now
successor to the late Lebow as marathon director, responded, "There
wasn't any structure."
"But it looked good," Sutton said.
Rudin's family happily put up $25,000 in sponsorship money in
exchange for naming the marathon's championship trophy after his father.
"Fred, to his credit, said from Day One, 'It'll never work,'" Rudin
said. So, why did Rudin think it would work?
"If these guys [who presented the initial plans] thought it
would work, it would work. You know, it was presented as a one-shot thing, as
part of the Bicentennial Celebration."
In fact, banners that day advertised the '76 event as the
"N.Y.C. Bicentennial Five-Borough Marathon." It was assumed that
the marathon would go back to the friendly confines of Central Park in '77.
Instead, details were tweaked to make it better, for one thing, the lonely
stretch along the FDR Drive was replaced with what is now an annual
hightlight. the tumultous spectator corridor along First Avenue.
"Quite honestly," said the garrulous Crawford, "we
never thought it would work. We thought it would be a royal screw-up. A one-
shot deal, and 'Im-leavin'-town-after-the-marathon.'"
Charlie McCabe, vice president of Manufacturers Hanover Bank
(since merged with Chemical and then Chase), was approached by Lebow for
$7,500 in sponsorship money. "We gave him $5,000," McCabe said. But
McCahc also allowed Lebow and his marathon organizers to use a Manny-Hanny
office for operations headquarters.
Also in the mix then were Lynn Blackstone, who was in charge of
getting world-class runners to compete. George Hirsch, then publisher of New
Times magazine, who provided a slick program for the race; Joe Kleinerman,
longtime racing official who handled runner applications and correspondence;
Alice Schneider, now married to Steinfeld, a veteran volunteer stuffer of
marathon envelopes.
Mad scientists all. And their friendly monster still grows.
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