Unlike the marathon's five-borough sweep, the NYC Half is a tighter, two-borough story: Brooklyn to Manhattan, park to park, in 13.1 miles. The course has genuinely changed in recent years — most notably a 2025 switch from the Manhattan Bridge to the Brooklyn Bridge — so it's worth understanding the current route rather than an older description. This guide walks the course section by section, from the Prospect Park start to the Central Park finish.

The start in Brooklyn: Prospect Park to Flatbush Avenue

The race starts on Washington Avenue, a residential street bordering the Brooklyn Museum at the northern edge of Prospect Park. From the start, the route heads into the park itself, including a climb up Battle Pass Hill early in the race — not a long climb, but enough to raise a few heart rates before runners have settled into pace. Exiting the park, the course loops around Grand Army Plaza, passing the Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch, before turning onto Flatbush Avenue. This stretch runs past the Barclays Center in Downtown Brooklyn and is generally described as fast — wide, gently sloped, and easy to overrun in the early-race adrenaline. Runners who go out too hard here tend to feel it later, either on the bridge climb or in Central Park's closing hills.

Into Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge

Around the four-to-five-mile mark, the course crosses into Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge — a route change introduced in 2025, when construction in Lower Manhattan, on the route between the Manhattan Bridge and the FDR Drive, forced NYRR to reroute. It marked the first time any NYRR race had used the Brooklyn Bridge, and the race has continued to use it in the editions since. The bridge climb is sustained rather than steep, run on the roadway rather than the pedestrian walkway, and offers a view of the Manhattan skyline directly ahead, from a vantage no other NYRR race has offered. From the bridge, runners pick up the FDR Drive northbound along the East River.

The FDR Drive and the Times Square surge

The FDR Drive segment runs for several miles along Manhattan's east side, with the East River on one side and the elevated highway's barriers on the other — a stretch with little crowd support but a chance to settle into rhythm on largely flat road. Runners exit the FDR around 42nd Street, passing near Grand Central Terminal before turning onto Seventh Avenue. That turn leads directly into Times Square, closed to traffic for the race — one of only two days a year that happens — and widely described as the emotional high point of the course, with dense crowds and a sudden jump in noise after the relative quiet of the FDR.

The Central Park finish

From Times Square, the route continues north up Seventh Avenue to Central Park South, turns east toward Manhattan's Grand Army Plaza and enters the park there, then crosses the 72nd Street Transverse and finishes on West Drive. Central Park's interior drives roll more than they look on a map, and this closing stretch has a reputation for testing runners who've spent their reserves earlier on the bridge or in the Times Square surge. There's no single hill that defines the finish so much as a series of short rises and falls that keep asking for effort in the race's final mile. For a closer look at how that elevation profile actually feels underfoot, see RaceRove's companion elevation guide for this race, which covers the climbs and descents in more descriptive detail.