On July 3rd, 2018 I trudged through the woods of Van Cortlandt Park in the middle of the night until I found my way to ‘Vault Hill’, the apex of Van Cortland’s famed Cross Country running course and the former resting grounds of the Van Cortlandt family. It was 1 AM, and my plan was to spend the entire night running alone through the streets of NYC until I reached the shores of Coney Island, a 28-mile run that would recreate the escape route from The Warriors, the iconic 1979 cult film by Walter Hill and one of the greatest running movies of all time. That night would change my life…
In the 1980’s, my brother and I became obsessed with The Warriors. Like many white teens growing up in the suburbs, the movie was intoxicating and in regular rotation in our basement, offering the two of us a view of the mysterious, gritty world of NYC gang life. I was fascinated with this gang, which was racially mixed and super tough.
(link to Photo: https://vocal.media/geeks/the-brilliance-of-the-opening-sequence-from-the-warriors)
Hill’s view, of course, was a comic book version of the real-life gangs that patrolled the streets of NYC in the 1970s. When the economy collapsed in 1975, the City laid off over 5000 police officers and 14,000 city workers, creating the perfect conditions for gang rule as neighborhoods across the City were carved up and patrolled by youth gangs. What you see in the Warriors in the Orphan’s scene is no joke – gangs who wore colors on another’s turf would be attacked, killed or chased away… By 1979, the year The Warriors was released, NYC had 1,700 murders – compare that to 2021, when we had 485 murders.
To give you an idea of how pervasive street gangs were in 1970s, see this map I pulled from a NY Times feature story, examining the surge in murders and robberies across NYC as policing eroded and gangs proliferated in 1974:
Here’s a link to the map: https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2014/12/screaming-phantoms-tomahawks-phantoms.html
I arrived at Coney Island on the 4th of July 2018, at dawn, just as I had planned. I asked a young girl on the beach to take my picture, and recorded this memorable snap…
I posted about the run the next morning – and then the madness began. I started receiving an endless stream of calls and outreach from other runners who were also obsessed with this film, and would join me if I ever chose to run it again… and the rest, as they say, is history.
