Bedford Avenue to Close to Traffic Sunday as 60,000 Marathon Runners Stream Through Williamsburg: What You Need to Know

By Williamsburg 365 Staff

The NYC marathon comes through the neighborhood again this Sunday, November 1. The 26.2-mile course runs straight up Bedford Avenue, on a day when the street is usually packed.

Nearly 60,000 runners are expected this year, the 50th anniversary of the five-borough course, with some 2.5 million spectators lining the route citywide. Runners come off the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, head up Fourth Avenue, swing onto Lafayette Avenue, and turn onto Bedford near mile 10. From there they stay on Bedford all the way through the neighborhood, past mile 11, then push into Greenpoint and over the Pulaski Bridge into Queens.

That stretch of Bedford has its own marathon history. Fred Lebow, the race's co-founder, was born Fischel Leibowitz in Arad, a small Transylvanian town in western Romania, the second youngest of seven children in an Orthodox Jewish family. When the Nazis occupied Arad, his father was sent to a work camp and ordered to wear a yellow star. Later, as a boy of 13, he learned that the Nazis had murdered his entire family, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. A Holocaust survivor, he eventually immigrated to New York City.

After the war, Lebow was no longer religious. In 1990 he became a baal teshuva and a shomer Torah u'mitzvos. He saw the Chasidim along Bedford as the strictest standard-bearers of the Judaism he had lost in his flight from the Nazis and the Communists, only to find it again. He used to ride ahead of the marathon on top of a limousine on Bedford Avenue with a megaphone, greeting Williamsburg residents and cheering the runners on in Yiddish.

Sunday is not a quiet day here. For the Chasidic community it is a full business day, with stores open after Shabbos, trucks making deliveries, and Bedford carrying shoppers, buses and commercial traffic from morning to night. This Sunday, most of that has to wait or go around. Williamsburg Shomrim are working side by side with the NYPD and city agencies to get traffic on Bedford Avenue moving again as soon as possible this Sunday, once the last runners come through.

The city's published schedule has Fourth Avenue between 94th Street and Flatbush Avenue closed Sunday from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Seven other stretches close from 7:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.: Bedford Avenue between Lafayette and Nassau avenues, Lafayette Avenue between Flatbush and Bedford avenues, Nassau Avenue between Bedford Avenue/Lorimer Street and Manhattan Avenue, Manhattan Avenue between Nassau and Greenpoint avenues, Greenpoint Avenue between Manhattan Avenue and McGuinness Boulevard, McGuinness Boulevard between Greenpoint and 48th avenues, and the Pulaski Bridge.

The city says the closures can roll, and reopenings are up to the NYPD on the ground. Streets reopen on a rolling basis behind the runners, and the city's anticipated reopening for the Brooklyn course streets, Bedford included, is 6:30 p.m.

If you have deliveries, get them in before or after the closure window. Move parked cars off the route early. Give yourself extra time anywhere near the course.

photo: Hasidim in USA