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• Date: 1994
• Sculptor: Jesus Ygnacio Dominguez
• Medium & size: Bronze, life-size, on a black granite pedestal.
• Location (usually): Central Park, 90th Street and the East Drive.

Even the monuments in New York are restlessly energetic. William Early Dodge, “the Christian merchant,” moved from Herald Square to Bryant Park. Dr. Sims, the “Father of gynecology,” relocated from Bryant Park to 103rd Street and then to the Green-Wood Cemetery. Samuel Morse shifted from 83rd to 72nd Street, Simon Bolivar from 82nd to 59th, Alexander Humboldt from 59th Street to 77th Street, and the Tigress from Cherry Hill to the Zoo. But Fred Lebow’s sculpture wins the award for being Manhattan’s most peripatetic: this bronze figure moves twice a year.

Unless you’re a runner or a marathon groupie, you probably won’t recognize the name of Fischel Lebowitz, a man every bit as restless as this sculpture of him. Born in Romania, Lebowitz fled the Nazis and then the Communists, becoming a black-market courier in Czechoslovakia. In 1951, as an Irish “stateless citizen,” he immigrated to Brooklyn to study the Talmud. By the late 1950s he was in Cleveland, selling the latest high-tech item – televisions – and he had changed his name to Fred Lebow. In the 1960s, Lebow came back to New York and made a fortune selling knock-offs of polyester double-knits by famous designers.

Hoping to develop more stamina for tennis, Lebow took up running – and fell in love with it. In 1970, at his first marathon, kids threw rocks at the few, fanatical runners panting up and down and up and down Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. The same year, Lebow and the New York Road Runners established a marathon that ran around and around the drive in Central Park – which in the 1970s was hardly safer than the Bronx. That marathon attracted only 126 participants.

But by luring celebrity runners, Lebow soon made New York’s marathon a world-class event. In 1976, when the course was first mapped through all five boroughs, about 2,000 runners participated.

In 1992, Lebow ran his last marathon with a field of over 25,000.

Lebow’s sculpture was unveiled in 1994, at the finish line, in the presence of twenty-three previous winners of the New York City Marathon. Although it now stands at the east entrance to the Reservoir track, every year on the first Sunday in November, Lebow is present to time the arrivals at the finish line.

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