EAST HARLEM — Experience running the New York City Marathon without breaking a sweat.
A new exhibit at the City Museum of New York recreates the race with photographs from runners, fans, photojournalists and curious New Yorkers.
“I’ve never personally run the marathon but this was a way for me to see the event through multiple perspectives all in one setting,” curator Sean Corcoran said.
The museum put out an open call to photographers with images of the race and received more than 3,000. For the exhibit, 130 of those images are set up along the marathon route that hovers above a floor that’s been painted to look like the five boroughs.
“We wanted people who had run the race to kind of participate in sharing with the rest of us who hadn’t run what their experience was like,” Corcoran said.
As you walk through the exhibit, you start out seeing eager runners in the Staten Island ferry, and their journey across the Verrazano bridge into Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and across the finish line in Central Park.
The exhibit lets people see how runners experience different neighborhoods.
Fort Greene in Brooklyn, for instance, throws a party with a live band that energizes the runners as they pass through, said Alison Desir who ran last year.
The experience left such a lasting impact on her that she and the running group she is a part of, Harlem Run, want to recreate it on Fifth Avenue
The group is setting up a hydration station on 135th Street and a massive cheering station with food, a tent, a live DJ and about 300 screaming fans on 137th Street starting at 11 a.m. on Nov. 1, she said.
“The idea is to have everyone who is running to know that Harlem is the best part of the marathon,” she said.
At the exhibit, history junkies will also be able to explore a timeline of the race that goes back to the inaugural marathon in 1970 and read profiles of professional and amateur runners who have competed over the years.
The exhibit opened Tuesday and will run through March 8.
