Alberto Arroyo, a familiar face to decades of joggers around the Central Park Reservoir, died on Thursday at age 94 in a nursing home. Arroyo had said he was "the first man to run in Central Park," and the NY Times writes in his obituary, "Who could dispute him? What is certain is that generations of runners came to treasure the leathery-skinned gentleman with flowing white hair and matching mustache as a peculiarly New York institution."
A former boxer from Puerto Rico, Arroyo had taken to running in Central Park along the bridle path, but after a police officer told him he was bothering the horses, Arroyo ran around the reservoir. That was 1937. Arroyo also used to run during his lunch hour while working at Bethlehem Steel in Battery Park, which was unheard of back then, and ran in the first NYC marathon. In more recent years, Arroyo would walk clockwise around the reservoir with a walker, greeting runners and offering them encouragement. He was even given a State Senate resolution in 1985, acknowledging his 50 years of running and calling him one of the "pioneers of the jogging trend."
The Times profiled him in 2005, looking at his spartan life in a SRO on the Upper West Side, with a great audio slideshow. Last year, the Times reported that Arroyo, living in a nursing home, was still going to the park, even though he was limited by a stroke, thanks to other runners: "So several days a week since September, members of Arroyo’s running family have been taking him nearly a mile by wheelchair to the reservoir — even when there is snow on the ground or when they need to bundle him in several layers."
Here's a 2002 video of Arroyo:
