Tommy Ledden has lived since 1940 in Long Island City, the Queens neighborhood that marathoners wind their way through in the 14th and 15th miles.
“Everybody was Irish or Italian,” said Ledden, one of the Irish guys, over a beer at Corner Bistro on Vernon Boulevard. “They intermarried. Talk to another old-timer around here and I’m probably related to them.”
Ledden, a retired iron worker with a white thatch and a friendly manner, remembers when the sink tub was in the kitchen and when it was the Vernon Avenue Bridge that crossed into Greenpoint, before the Pulaski opened in 1954. In fact, he seems to remember every detail about the old Long Island City.
“The Budweiser keeps the memory going,” he said.
To say Ledden has seen some changes in the last 15 years is putting it mildly. Old warehouses and factories have been converted into condos, and amenity-filled apartment towers with postcard views of Manhattan form a mini skyline near the East River (to the runners’ left as they arrive in Queens). Further inland, closer to the towering Citicorp building, a new neighborhood is rising from scratch.
Once gritty, Long Island City now has more of a Greenwich Village feel, complete with Greenwich Village restaurants.
Corner Bistro, a packed burger-and-beer joint on West Fourth Street, has a Long Island City offshoot where Tommy Ledden’s bar stool resides and window seats offer a view of the marathon course. He’s an old-neighborhood guy in a new-neighborhood bar.
The Times did a fascinating examination last year of the dramatic demographic shifts that have occurred along the entire course since the race went to five boroughs in 1976. An interactive feature traced neighborhood-by-neighborhood income changes like a roller-coaster ride. The line spiked in Park Slope (+288 percent), but soared to the heavens (+374 percent) in Long Island City.
The invasion of the Manhattanites hasn’t bothered Ledden one bit.
“They’re all nice people,” he said. “Everyone I’ve met.”
Next, it’s the marathoners’ turn to invade Manhattan.
