Somewhere on Fourth Avenue this November, a neighbor will drag a folding chair to the curb before eight in the morning, prop a cowbell against the armrest, and wait. This happens every year. What's different in 2026 is that the block she's standing on has a new place to eat when the runners pass, and the block eight blocks north still doesn't.
Sunday, November 1 marks the 50th running of the five-borough New York City Marathon course, the same route laid out in 1976 for the U.S. Bicentennial. Brooklyn carries close to 12 of the race's 26.2 miles, which puts nearly half the entire course inside the borough. No other borough comes close to that share. Staten Island gets the start line and a bridge. The Bronx gets a single loop. Manhattan gets the finish and the wall of noise on First Avenue. Brooklyn gets almost half the race.
That's the fact every marathon guide repeats. The part they miss is that the 12 miles aren't one continuous party moving at the same speed. They're four distinct neighborhood stretches stitched together by a single day, and this year exactly one address along that stretch changed hands in a way that matters for anyone standing near it.
Almost Half the Race, Four Different Blocks
The Brooklyn portion of the course runs a specific path, and knowing it changes how you plan the day whether you're running, cheering, or just trying to get across town.
| Mile Marker | Neighborhood | What's There | Subway |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2–4 | Bay Ridge into Sunset Park | Runners exit the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge onto Fourth Avenue | R |
| 7.75 | Boerum Hill | Fourth Avenue at St. Marks Place | R |
| 8 | Park Slope / Prospect Heights | Fourth Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, near Barclays Center | B, D, N, Q, R, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
| 8–10 | Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bed-Stuy | Lafayette Avenue | C, G |
| 10–13 | Williamsburg into Greenpoint | Bedford Avenue | G, L, M, J |
| 13.1 | Greenpoint, at the Pulaski Bridge | Exit point into Queens, bridge itself closed to spectators | G |
The course leaves Fourth Avenue around mile 8 and turns onto Lafayette Avenue through Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Bed-Stuy before it picks up Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. That middle stretch is easy to overlook because it doesn't have a Barclays Center or a Smorgasburg to anchor it, but it's real course, real miles, and real crowd.
The Cheer Zones That Run Every Year, Unchanged
Some of these blocks have their marathon-day rituals locked in, and locked-in is worth knowing before you assume everything about the day is new.
Whisk & Whiskey at 259 Fourth Avenue in Boerum Hill runs its cheer station for the fourth year in a row, opening around 8 a.m. with a DJ, grab-and-go coffee, and a whiskey tasting, plus $12 mimosas and Bloody Marys once the bar opens. The Dashing Whippets running club holds the Fourth Avenue and St. Marks Place corner at mile 7.75, a stretch they specifically chose because the early miles get less attention than the ones closer to the finish. Near the Brooklyn-Queens handoff, the Bushwick-based MMM Atletico group sets up at McGuinness Boulevard and Green Street in Greenpoint, right before the course reaches the Pulaski Bridge, working the crowd with megaphones at what amounts to the race's midpoint.
None of that changed this year. These are community fixtures that show up on the same corners every November regardless of what's opening or closing around them, and that consistency is part of what makes marathon Sunday feel like marathon Sunday rather than just a Sunday with more foot traffic.
Where the Food Map Actually Moved
One address on the route changed in a way that will be obvious to anyone who cheered here last year.
At 151 Union Street in Carroll Gardens, a couple of blocks off the Fourth Avenue route between the Bay Ridge start and the Barclays Center marker at mile 8, Bar Ferdinando opened April 15 in the space that held Ferdinando's Focacceria for 121 years before it closed in February 2025. That's worth sitting with for a second: for the 2025 marathon, that storefront was dark, the first race Sunday in over a century that the old Sicilian institution wasn't there to feed the neighborhood. Restaurateur Sal Lamboglia, who runs three other spots within a block or so of the original, was hand-picked by longtime owner Frank Buffa to take it over, and the new all-day cafe and cocktail bar kept the pane e panelle and Sicilian rice balls on the menu alongside an aperitivo program built around amaro and vermouth. For anyone cheering near the Carroll Gardens side of Fourth Avenue this November, it's the first marathon Sunday in two years with that address back in business.
Everywhere else along the Brooklyn stretch, from the Lafayette Avenue corridor through Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Bed-Stuy to the Bedford Avenue run through Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the bars and bodegas hosting marathon-day crowds this year are the same ones that hosted them last year. That's not a knock on those neighborhoods. It just means the one real change on this 12-mile stretch happens to sit at its southern end, in the shadow of a business that had been part of the block since 1904.
Getting Around Without a Car
If you're planning to catch a runner at more than one point, the subway lines split cleanly by segment. The R train follows the Fourth Avenue stretch from Bay Ridge through Boerum Hill. Once the course crosses to Flatbush Avenue near Barclays Center at mile 8, the B, D, N, Q, R, 2, 3, 4, and 5 all converge there, which is the easiest single spot to plan around if you only have one stop to make. The G and L trains cover the Lafayette Avenue and Bedford Avenue stretches respectively, and the G is also the fastest way to get to the Greenpoint side of the Pulaski Bridge, since the bridge itself is closed to spectators and the crossing into Queens has to happen by subway, not on foot.
The Day Doesn't Move the Same Way Everywhere
Marathon Sunday in Brooklyn gets treated as a single event because the runners technically pass through on one continuous course. But if you live near mile 3 in Bay Ridge, mile 8 near Barclays, or mile 12 in Greenpoint, you're not experiencing the same day at all, and this year the difference isn't just geography. It's that one address in Carroll Gardens has a reason to stop and stay a while that didn't exist for last year's race, while the rest of the 12-mile stretch is running on the same cheer stations and the same corner bars it always has.
That kind of unevenness is worth knowing before you plan where to stand, and it's the same kind of texture The Connelly Team pays attention to across Brooklyn and the rest of Long Island, whether the question is where to watch a Sunday morning race or what a block's changing character means for a home on it. If you're curious what a shift like this looks like reflected in your own property, Request Your Free Home Valuation and we'll walk through it with you.
