No other World Marathon Major makes bridge-crossing so literal a part of its identity. The New York City Marathon's five-borough concept isn't just a marketing line — it's held together by five specific bridges, each with its own history, character, and role in how the race actually feels underfoot. Here they are in the order runners cross them, with the details worth knowing before you get there.

1. Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge — Staten Island to Brooklyn

The race's opening bridge is also its most famous: a suspension bridge spanning the entrance to New York Harbor, named for Giovanni da Verrazzano, the first European explorer recorded to have sailed into the harbor. Runners cross on both the upper and lower roadways depending on their starting wave, climbing steadily before descending into Brooklyn. It's the only bridge on the course crossed before the crowds have had a chance to gather, which makes it feel more like a solitary, scenic prologue than a spectator moment.

2. Pulaski Bridge — Brooklyn to Queens

Named for Casimir Pulaski, a Polish-born general who served under George Washington in the Revolutionary War, this drawbridge crosses Newtown Creek to connect Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood to Long Island City in Queens. It's smaller and far less famous than the bridges around it, but it carries real significance for runners: crossing it is widely cited as landing right around the race's halfway point, making it a genuine psychological marker as much as a physical one.

3. Queensboro Bridge — Queens to Manhattan

Officially the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge (though almost everyone, runners included, still calls it the Queensboro or the 59th Street Bridge), this cantilever bridge opened in 1909 and has carried the marathon across the East River since the course first linked all five boroughs. Runners take the enclosed lower roadway, a stretch with no spectators and little natural light — the quietest, most isolating section of the entire race, and one of its most talked-about.

4. Willis Avenue Bridge — Manhattan to the Bronx

After miles of noise on First Avenue, the course crosses the Harlem River into the Bronx over the Willis Avenue Bridge, a swing bridge rebuilt in the early 2010s. It's a short crossing, but it lands at a notoriously difficult point in the race — deep enough into the marathon that many runners are meeting real fatigue for the first time, right as a new bridge climb appears in front of them.

5. Madison Avenue Bridge — the Bronx back to Manhattan

The fifth and final bridge, another swing bridge over the Harlem River, carries runners out of the Bronx and back into Manhattan for good, feeding onto Fifth Avenue for the run south toward Central Park. It's the last river crossing of the day — from here, whatever's left of the course is entirely dry land, which is its own small relief after five bridges' worth of climbs.

None of these bridges are hidden information — they're printed on every official course map — but knowing their names, order, and personality in advance turns five anonymous climbs into five landmarks you're actually looking forward to.

More than just marathon crossings

Every one of these five bridges carries ordinary city traffic the other 364 days of the year — commuters, trucks, cyclists — which makes the sight of them closed and filled entirely with runners genuinely unusual, even for New Yorkers. Shutting down five major East River and Harlem River crossings for a single event, in sequence, for several hours, is a logistical undertaking that few cities could pull off, and it's part of why the marathon reads as a citywide event rather than just a long run through it.

For runners, the bridges also double as natural photo and memory landmarks — the harbor views from the Verrazzano-Narrows, the skyline glimpses on the Queensboro's approach, the brief, strange quiet of the Harlem River crossings late in the race. Long after race-day fatigue fades, it's often these five specific crossings that people describe first when asked what they remember.