Fred Lebow

person · earth · New York

Co-founder and long-time director of the New York City Marathon. He ran the first race in Central Park on 13 September 1970, finishing 45th of the 55 who completed it, and spent the following six years lobbying for permission to take the course out of the park and across all five boroughs, which happened in 1976. Lebow is the person through whom the marathon became a municipal event: the thing he had to obtain was not a course but the consent of a city to close itself.