Dec 04, 2008

100 Greatest Moments in Armory History

To celebrate the 100th Anniversary of The 168th Street Armory, ArmoryTrack.com will count down the 100 greatest moments in Armory history.

Starting, December 2nd, each day we will announce a new one.

Tune in each day to see the next great moment and to reflect on all that has happened here at The Armory in the last century.

#1 Jan. 20, 2001

Alan Webb (South Lakes HS, Reston Va) runs 3:59.86 to set the national high school record in the mile, becoming the only high school runner to break 4 minutes indoors and the first indoors or out since 1967; at the New Balance Games. Six months later, Webb runs 3:53.43 to break Jim Ryun’s 36-year-old national high school record.

#2 Jan. 17, 1925

Paavo Nurmi of Finland sets the world record of 5:33.0 in the 2,000 meters, at the Fordham Games. At the time, Nurmi was reigning Olympic champion in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters.

Olympic champion in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters. #3 March 7, 1925
Georgetown sets world records in the mile relay (3:21.8) and 2-mile relay (7:41.6), using 8 different runners, at the IC4A Championships: George Kinneally, Vernon Ascher, Paul Herlihy and Jimmy Burgess in the 4x4; Edward Swinburne, Edward Brooks, Johnny Holden and George Marsters in the 4x8. The 4x8 record lasted 16 years and was the Armory record for 74 years. A month and a half later, the Hoyas won both events at the Penn Relays, running 3:19 and 7:42.0, the latter the Relays record until 1941.

#4 March 1, 2002
The Boys & Girls HS (Brooklyn) team of Akilah Vargas, Keziah Fernandez, Meisue Francis and Stacy-ann Livingston becomes the first high school girls team to break 9 minutes in the indoor 4x800, running 8:53.67 at the USATF nationals.

#5 Jan. 18, 1964

Bill McClellon (DeWitt Clinton HS, Bronx) breaks the national high school record in the high jump, clearing 6-7 ¾ at the Cardinal Hayes Games. Over the next 13 months, coached by the legendary Charlie Scher, he broke the record 3 more times, clearing 6-8, 6-9 ½ and 6-10 ¼ between January 1964 and January 1965. He later became the first high school athlete to clear 7 feet, in June 1965 in California.

#6 March 20, 1926

DeHart Hubbard of Michigan, competing at the Games of the NY Postal Clerks, sets the world record in the long jump, 24-7 ¼, a record that stood until broken by Jesse Owens. Hubbard had won the 1924 Olympic championship. On the same evening, Charles Hoff of Norway broke his own world record in the pole vault, clearing 13-7 ½. A remarkable athlete, Hoff represented Norway in the Olympics in the 400- and 800-meter runs.

#7 March 7, 1931

The University of Pennsylvania mile relay team of John Edwards, Horace Steel, James Healey and Bill Carr becomes the first team to break 3:20 indoors, setting a world record of 3:17.8 at the IC4A Championships. A year later in Los Angeles, Carr won Olympic gold medals in the 400 and the 4x4, setting world records in both.

#8 March 10, 2002

Sanya Richards (St. Aquinas H.S., Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) defeats Allyson Felix (Los Angeles Baptist H.S., Calif.) in the 200 meters at the National Scholastic championships, 23.22-23.68, breaking her own national high school record. Felix won the 60, in 7.44. Both went on to make the 2004 and 2008 Olympic teams and were teammates on the U.S. gold medal 4x4 team in Beijing. Also running 3/10/02 were New York girls Shana Cox and Natasha Hastings. Cox was NCAA 400 champion for Penn State in 2008, and Hastings was yet another member of the ’08 gold medal 4x4 team.

#9 March 14, 2004

Xavier Carter (Palm Bay HS, Melbourne Fla) becomes the only high school athlete to break 21 seconds indoors in the 200, running 20.69 for a national high school record at the National Scholastic. Carter later had a hand in four victories in a single NCAA championships for LSU, duplicating Jesse Owens’s feat for Ohio State 70 years earlier. At the Armory, Carter won championships in 2005 and 2006 for the Tigers in the 200 and 400.

#10 Jan. 10, 1953

Reggie Pearman wins the Senior Mets 600y in 1:11.7, equaling the meet record set by the legendary Jimmy Herbert in 1942, defeating Vern Dixon of Manhattan College and Herb McKenley and Mal Whitfield of the Grand Street Boys. McKenley had been a member of the Olympic-champion Jamaican 4x4 team, which had set the world record in defeating the Americans in 1952, while Whitfield was the two-time Olympic champion in the 800; they were 2 of 6 Olympic champions competing that evening. Also competing were Lindy Remigino of Manhattan, Olympic champion in the 100 and 4x1; Andy Stanfield/GSB, gold medalist in the 200 and 4x1; Meredith Gourdine, like Pearman a member of Joe Yancey’s NY Pioneer Club, bronze in the LJ; Horace Ashenfelter, Sullivan Award winner and Olympic champion in the steeplechase; Jimmy Gathers, bronze in the 200; Tom Courtney, who ran a leg for Fordham in the 2-mile relay, Olympic champion in the 800 in ’56; walkers Henry Laskau (3 Olympics) and Rudy Haluza (2 Games); the actor Roscoe Lee Browne, who won the 1,000 that night for the Pioneers, and Tom Murphy, future Olympian in the 800 who anchored the St. Augustine HS 2-mile relay team to victory. Murphy is a cousin of another famous St. Augustine graduate, Walt Murphy, the track historian and writer. Pearman, a graduate of Newtown HS (Queens) and NYU, made the Olympic 800 final in ’52 and was a member of a world-record 4x880 that year; Herbert, who set the world indoor record in the 600 in 1940, went to Stuyvesant and anchored NYU’s winning Penn Relays mile relay in 1940.

#11 Jan. 19, 2008

Chanelle Price (Easton Area HS, Easton Pa) sets the national high school record of 1:10.30 in the 500-meter run, at the New Balance Games. Price also set Armory records in 2008 in the 800 and 1,000-meter runs. She ran in the 2008 Olympic Trials in the 800 in June before going on to the University of Tennessee.

#12 Feb. 12, 1966
Julio Meade (Andrew Jackson HS, Queens) takes an elbow from Otis Hill (White Plains, NY) during another torrid 300 on the flat Armory track, but recovers in time to run him down from behind and win another thriller, 31.3-31.4. It was the 4th meeting between the pair that winter, all won by Meade in one of the greatest rivalries the building has ever witnessed: the 300 at the Bishop Loughlin Games in December, the 400 at the Cardinal Hayes Games Jan. 15 and another 400 a week later at the St. Francis Prep Games. Ironically, in 1965, both Meade and Hill had lesser-known teammates who went on to greater fame. Meade ran at Jackson with Vince Matthews, later the 1972 Olympic champion in the 400, and Hill went to White Plains with Larry James, a member of the world-record-setting American 4x400 team in the 1968 Games. In the ’65 outdoor track season, James and Hill helped White Plains set national high school records in the 880 and mile relays, the last time an Eastern school has held either record. In the ’66 outdoor season, Meade helped Andrew Jackson defeat archrival Boys High in the 2-mile relay in 7:35.6, setting a national record that stood for 36 years, a race memorialized in a famous article by the writer and historian Marc Bloom.

#13 March 12, 2004

The Mountain View HS (Orem, Utah) DMR team of Heidi Houle, Melynne King, Ann Marie Thomas and Heidi Magill breaks the high school girls national record by 16 seconds, running 11:35.43 at the National Scholastic.

#14 March 11, 1922
LeRoy Brown of Dartmouth breaks the world record in the men’s high jump, jumping 6-4 7/8 at the inaugural indoor IC4A Championships. After nearly 50 years as an outdoor-only event, the IC4A established an indoor championships and held them at the Armory from 1922 to 1931. For the occasion, the conference built its own 6-lane, 220-yard banked track, which it assembled every March for the meet, then disassembled and stored afterward. Later, because the Armory could seat only 6,000, the meet moved to Madison Square Garden, where it had capacity crowds for many years.

#15 March 14, 2004
The Long Beach Poly girls team of Deshanta Harris, Jasmine Lee, Shana Woods and Shalonda Solomon becomes the only team to break 3:40 in the indoor 4x400, running 3:38.91 for a national high school record.

#16 March 30, 1920

Joie Ray of the Illinois Athletic Club becomes the first man to break 4:00 indoors in the 1,500 meters, running 3:57.0 at the Wanamaker Games. Two years later at the Armory, Ray set the world record in the 5,000, running 14:54.6.

#17 March 12, 2006

Walter Henning (St. Anthony’s, South Huntington, LI, NY) breaks the national high school record in the boys’ weight throw, throwing 84-11 ¾ and 85-6 at the National Scholastic. He broke the record on two more occasions in 2007 and set numerous records outdoors in the hammer throw. The Armory first built a cage to accommodate the weight throw, then disassembled and rebuilt it to add more landing area once Henning began throwing beyond 85 feet

#18 March 13, 2005
The Long Beach Poly boys 4x200 team of Isaiah Green, Vincent Joseph, Travon Patterson and Bryshon Nellum sets the national high school record of 1:26.09, smashing the old record of 1:26.90.

#19 Jan. 23, 1960

Gary Gubner (DeWitt Clinton, Bronx) sets the national high school record in the shot put of 63-0 at the St. Francis Prep Games. Gubner went on to win the NCAA championship for NYU, set the world indoor record, and compete in the Olympic Games in weightlifting.

#20 March 16, 2003

Reggie Witherspoon (Wheeler HS, Marietta Ga) breaks the national high school record in the 400 (46.11), wins the 200 (21.14) and runs a spectacular anchor in the 4x400 at the National Scholastic. Witherspoon went on to win a gold medal on the Olympic 4x400 team in Beijing in 2008.

#21 Jan. 9, 1926
Otto Rosner (New Utrecht HS, Brooklyn) becomes the first high school boy to break 2:00 indoors in the 880, running 1:59.8 at the De La Salle Games.

#22 March 6, 1965
Boys High of Brooklyn breaks the national high school record in the 880 relay twice in one day. The team of Ulysses Davis, Jim Washington, Bill Miller and LeRoy Foster ran 1:30.5 in the heats and 1:30.1 in the final of the PSAL Novice Championships, on the old flat wood Armory floor. In the final Boys narrowly held off their rivals from Queens, Andrew Jackson HS, anchored by the legendary Julio Meade. /MB/

#23 March 13, 2004

Shana Woods (Long Beach Poly) sets the national record of 3,846 points in the pentathlon at the National Scholastic. Over the next three years she won the NS pentathlon two more times, broke her record by scoring 3,924, long-jumped 20-10 and ran a leg on the national-record-setting 4x4.

#24 March 2, 2002

Miguel Pate of Alabama jumps 28-2 ¼ to break Carl Lewis’s 20-year-old collegiate record in the long jump at the USATF Championships.

#25 Jan. 28, 1956
Al Phillips (Montclair, NJ) becomes the first high school boy to break 10 flat indoors for 100 yards, running 9.8 at the NYU Interscholastic.

#26 March 10, 2000
Gloucester HS (Mass.) becomes the only high school boys team to break 10 minutes indoors in the DMR, when Josh Palazola, Ngai Otieno, Shawn Milne and Tristan Colangelo run 9:59.94.

#27 Jan. 24, 2004
Gavin Coombs of Griswold (Conn.) wins the New Balance Games invitational boys’ mile by three-hundredths of a second, outleaning Hakon DeVries (John Jay, N.Y.) 4:11.35-4:11.38. The first 10 runners in the race broke 4:18, the first six 4:13. Coombs and DeVries were followed by Jeremy Zagorski (Parsippany Hills, N.J.), 4:11.87; Kevin Tschirhart (Northport, N.Y.), 4:12.69; Steve Hallinan (Cardinal O’Hara, Pa.), 4:12.72, and Andre Silva (Middle County, N.Y.), 4:12.86.

# 28 Feb. 14, 2004
Lolo Jones of LSU defeats Hyleas Fountain of Georgia in the Championship-division 60-meter hurdles, 8.17-8.20, at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational. Fountain also won the high jump, at 6-0 ½. At the 2008 Olympic Trials, Jones won the 100 hurdles and Fountain won the heptathlon – setting an American multi-event record in the 100 hurdles. At the Beijing Games, Fountain won the silver medal, but Jones whacked the 9th hurdle, while in the lead, in the hurdle final, missing the medals. At the 2004 NB meet, the College-division hurdles were won by Melaine Walker of Essex County College. Walker was Olympic champion in 2008 in the 400 hurdles for Jamaica.

#29 March 1, 2002
Nicole Teter sets the American record of 1:58.71 in the 800 meters at the USATF Championships.

#30 Dec. 19, 1959
Louise Mead Tricard, running for the Police Athletic League, sets an American record of 2:30.7 for the women’s indoor 880 yards, running at the Metropolitan AAU meet. A week later she lowered that to 2:28.5. Over the ensuing two decades, pioneering women runners competed at the Armory in countless all-comers meets. The Atoms TC, under the direction of Fred Thompson, set American relay records here in 1965, 1970 and 1971. Tricard went on to write and publish a 2-volume history of the early years of American women’s track and field.

#31 March 14, 2008
Deangelo Cherry (Mt. Zion HS, Jonesboro Ga) sets the national high school record in the boys 55-meter dash of 6.14 (timed during the longer 60-meter dash), at the National Scholastic.

#32 Dec. 21, 2002
Shana Cox (Holy Trinity, Hicksville NY) sets the national high school record in the 300 meters, running 37.59 at the Bishop Loughlin Games. Cox returned to the Armory in 2006 and won the New Balance 400 for Penn State, and won the NCAA outdoor championship for the Nittany Lions in ’08.

.#33 Feb. 9, 2002

Tennessee teammates Leonad Scott and Justin Gatlin nearly dead-heat in the New Balance Collegiate 60-meter dash. Both were timed in 6.56, with Gatlin winning by a few thousandths. Gatlin won the 2004 Olympic gold medal in the 100 meters.

#34 Feb. 14, 2003

The University of North Carolina women’s distance medley relay team wins the New Balance Collegiate Invitational in 11:08.56, the fastest time in the world at that point in the ’03 season. A month later, they won the NCAA. Five years later, three members of that squad – Erin Donohue, Alice Schmidt and Shalane Flanagan – all made the U.S. Olympic team, at varying distances. Of those, Flanagan – who also ran at the Armory in high school, when she hailed from Marblehead, Mass. – won a bronze medal, in the 10,000 meters, setting an American record as well.

#35 Feb. 24, 2004

Camden NJ becomes the first high school team to break 1:27 in the indoor 4x2, as the team of Dwayne Lewis, Sherron Bullock, Alonzo Brown and Carl Smith runs 1:26.90 for a national high school record at the Eastern States.

#36 Jan. 16, 1937
Lesley MacMitchell (George Washington HS, Washington Hts) sets the national high school record in the mile, running 4:28.6 at the Stuyvesant Games. MacMitchell later won the NCAA mile for NYU and the 1941 Sullivan Award, but because of World War II never made an Olympic team.

#37 March 1, 1924

Charles H. Moore of Penn State equals the world record of 9.0 for the 70-yard hurdles at the IC4A Championships. In 1951, Moore’s son Charley won the Heps 600 in 1:13.0 at the Armory for Cornell and a year later was Olympic champion in the 400 hurdles. The Heps were also held at the Armory in 1952 and, 55 years later, in 2007.

#38 Feb. 29, 1964
John Carlos (Manhattan Vocational) wins the PSAL 220 in 22.6. Four years later, Carlos won the bronze medal in the Olympic 200 and joined the winner, Tommie Smith, in a protest on the victory stand.

#39 Feb. 12, 1947

Irv (Moon) Mondschein sets a meet record at the college Mets, clearing 6-7 7/8 in the high jump for NYU. Before World War II, Mondschein won the PSAL HJ for Boys High of Brooklyn. After the war, he won the NCAA HJ twice for the Violets. He competed in the decathlon for the U.S. in the 1948 London Olympics, was a star pass receiver for NYU (playing games at Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium), coached the Israeli national team and later Lawrence HS, Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania.

#40 April 4, 1937
The team of George Tucknott, Ed Rogers, John Scanlon and John Quigley sets the national high school record in the sprint medley, running 3:46.8 for De La Salle Academy. The following winter in a series of races at the Garden, De La Salle broke the national record in the mile relay four times, eventually running 3:20.1, a time that remains the CHSAA indoor record 70 years later.

#41

Muna Lee wins six sprint titles for LSU at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational, winning the 60 and 200 every year from 2002 to 2004. Her time in the 200 (23.06) remains the meet and Armory records. She made the 2004 and 2008 U.S. Olympic teams. At the 2004 NB meet, Lee won the Championship division, while Kerron Stewart, running for Essex County College, won the College division. Stewart won gold, silver and bronze medals for Jamaica at the Beijing Olympics.

#42 Feb. 19, 1966
Jim Jackson, a junior at Boys High of Brooklyn, runs 2:14.0 to set a national flat-floor record for 1,000 yards. A week earlier he set a similar record in the 600, defeating his teammate and archrival, Mark Ferrell, 1:12.9-1:13.3, and a week later did it again for 880, running 1:55.2 at the PSAL Championships, again defeating Ferrell by a narrow margin. After his brilliant running career, Jackson later returned to his alma mater, now known as Boys & Girls, to a distinguished career as the head coach.

#43 March 17, 1917

John W. Overton sets world and American records in the 1,000-yard run (2:14.0) at the AAU Championships. A Yale graduate, Lieutenant Overton was killed in combat a year later in World War I.

#44 March 3, 1928
Lloyd Hahn of the Boston AA sets the world record in the 880 of 1:51.4, in a match race during the IC4A Championships. One of the competitors in the race was Pincus Sober, who became a legendary track official and announcer in NYC.

#45 March 13, 2004
Shenendehowa (Clifton Park, NY) sets the national high school record in the boys 4xmile at the National Scholastic. The team of Dan McManamon, Ryan Gaedje, Scott Mindel and Phil Roach ran 17:25.98.

#46 March 26, 1949
Evelyn Lawler places in the high jump, standing long jump and 4x1 relay at the AAU women’s nationals. She won outdoor national titles every year from 1949 to 1952. A star athlete at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Lawler later married Bill Lewis and together they coached outstanding track teams at Willingboro (N.J.) High Sschool, including their children Carl and Carol

#47 March 16, 2003

Shalonda Solomon runs legs on two national-record-setting relay teams for Long Beach Poly (4x2, 4x4), and a year later repeats that in the 4x4. In 2005 she returned to the Armory as a freshman at South Carolina, and in 2006 won the 200 for the Gamecocks at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational. At the Penn Relays, in four consecutive seasons she ran on two national-record-setting teams for LB Poly and on winning teams in the 4x1 and 4x2 for South Carolina.

#48 Feb. 28, 1923

Willie Ritola defeats Joie Ray in the 3-mile run at the K of C Games. Ritola set a world record of 14:15.8, Ray an American record of 14:16.0. Ray ran for the U.S. in 3 Olympic Games; Ritola won 5 gold medals and 3 silver for Finland in the 1924 and 1928 Games.

#49

Louis Zamperini comes to the Armory for the first time, appearing as honorary referee for the 2004 New Balance Collegiate Invitational. Almost 70 years earlier, Zamperini was in New York for the 1936 Olympic Trials at Randalls Island, making the U.S. team in the 5,000 the same day Jesse Owens won the 100. Zamperini, who finished 8th in the Berlin Games as a 19-year-old, went on to win the NCAA mile for USC before being shot down over the Pacific during World War II.

#50 Feb. 8, 1916
Howard Drew, representing the University of Southern California, equals the world indoor record for 100 yards, running 10.0 at the NYAC Games. Four years earlier Drew, one of the country’s first prominent African-American sprinters, had been favored to win the Olympic 100, only to pull a muscle in the qualifying round.

#51 Feb. 23, 1924
Frank Hussey (Stuyvesant, NYC) equals the national high school record of 10.2 for 100 yards at the Cornell University Games. Five months later, he led off the U.S. gold medal 4x1 team at the Olympics in Paris.

52 March 16, 2008

Conor McCullough (Chaminade, West Hills, Calif) sets the national high school record in the weight throw, throwing 87-10 ¾ at the National Scholastic to break Walter Henning’s year-old record.

#53 Jan. 25, 2003
Natasha Hastings (A. P. Randolph, NYC) sets the national high school record in the 500 meters, 1:11.84. That summer she was World Youth champion in the 400, a year later World Junior champion. In December ’04 she returned to the Armory as a student at South Carolina and set the World Junior record in the 500, 1:10.05, and in ’07 was back again for the Gamecocks, winning the New Balance 400 in 51.70. She later won the NCAA championship in the 400, and in 2008 won a gold medal in the Olympic 4x400.

#54 Jan. 8, 2000
Mark Carroll wins the New Balance Games mile in 3:54.98, setting an Armory record that still stands.

#55 Feb. 5, 2005
In a surprise assault on the national record, the Syosset (N.Y.) 4x8 team of Adam Lampert, Chris Howell, Sean Tully and Dan Tully, coached by Bart Sessa, runs 7:42.22.

#56 Feb. 18, 2001

Marla Runyan (Asics) sets an American record of 15:07.33 in the women’s 5,000 meters.

#57 Jan. 10, 2004
Natasha Hastings (A. P. Randolph H.S., NYC) won the Hispanic Games 400 in 54.21, defeating Nicole Leach (54.35) of Philadelphia, Janine Davis (55.33) of New Jersey and Dominque Blake (55.52) of the Bronx. Leach later won the NCAA 400 hurdles for UCLA; Davis set the national high school record for the indoor 600, and Blake ran a leg on the NCAA-championship 4x4 for Penn State.

#58 March 15, 2003
Donovan Kilmartin (Eagle, Idaho) sets the national high school record of 4,303 points in the boys’ pentathlon. He later starred for the University of Texas.

#59 Feb. 3, 2007
Andra Manson wins the men’s high jump at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational, for the Texas Longhorns, becoming the only athlete in the meet’s history to win the same event four times. In 2008 he made the U.S. Olympic team.

#60 Feb. 24, 1967

Byron Dyce wins the Met Intercollegiate 600 for NYU, running 1:13.2, one of many victories he recorded in the middle distances on the Armory floor in the 60s and 70s. A month earlier he set a meet record in the Met Senior AAU 1,000, running 2:12.8 as an 18-year-old sophomore. Dyce, a graduate of Erasmus Hall (Brooklyn), was an NCAA champion for the Violets and competed in three Olympic Games for Jamaica. He still holds the Jamaican national record in the mile (3:57.34 in 1974).

#61 Jan. 24, 2004
In an open 2-mile run contested as part of the New Balance Games, Josh McDougal, a home-schooled athlete from Peru, N.Y., upsets Galen Rupp (Central Catholic, Portland, Ore.), 8:50.40-8:54.45, becoming the only high school athletes to break 9 minutes at the Armory. Cheering from the sidelines were Galen’s coach, Alberto Salazar, and a visitor for the day, Frank Shorter, bringing together two of the country’s most famous marathoners. Four years later, McDougal, running for Liberty University, defeated Rupp, running for Oregon, to win the NCAA cross country championship. The following spring, Rupp made the Olympic team at 10,000 meters, and in Beijing recorded the fastest time ever run by an American in the Games for 10k.(3:57.34 in 1974).

#62 Feb. 14, 2003
Richard Kiplagat, a Kenyan running for Mick Byrne’s Iona Gaels, runs a solo 13:41.25 5,000 at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational. Over the course of his career, he set the Armory record in the 3,000 (7:49.98), ran a world-leading time in the mile (3:57.40), won the NB 3k in ’05 and anchored Iona to a heart-stopping 2nd-place finish in the Penn Relays 4xmile

#63 Feb. 2, 1951

Lindy Remigino, a sophomore at Manhattan College, wins the Mets 60 in 6.5 seconds. A year later in Stockholm, he was upset winner of the Olympic 100 and also ran a leg on the winning American 4x100 team.

#64 Jan. 31, 1953
Johnny Kopil (Bayonne, NJ) breaks the national high school record in the mile, running 4:20.1 at the NYU Interscholastic. Two weeks earlier, Kopil anchored Bayonne to the national record in the 2-mile relay, going 8:09.0 at the Cardinal Hayes Games.

#65 Feb. 23, 2002
Stacey-Ann Livingston (Boys & Girls, Brooklyn) becomes the first girl to run under 1:30 in the indoor 600 meters, running 1:29.69 for a national high school record.

#66 March 10, 2001
Samantha Shepard (Weston, Mass.) sets the national high school record twice in the girls’ pole vault at the National Scholastic, clearing 13-1 ¾ and 13-3 ½. A year later she raised that to 13-4 ¼. Amy Linnen of Long Island, Danielle O’Reilly of New Jersey and Stacie Manuel of Minnesota also set national records in the event at the Armory during the decade

#67 March 1, 2002
Adam Nelson sets an Armory record in the shot put, putting 70-9 ¼. Nelson made three U.S. Olympic teams and won two silver medals.

#68 Jan. 30, 1971
Matt Centrowitz (Power Memorial Academy, NYC) runs 4:21.3 in the mile early in his sophomore season at legendary Power Memorial, the alma mater of basketball great Lew Alcindor. Centrowitz went on to many great runs in high school and later at the University of Oregon, where he set the American record in the 5,000 meters. Later his daughter Lauren won an NCAA championship – matching her father’s feat – in cross country, running for Stanford, and her younger brother, Matthew, won the U.S. Junior 5k, running for his father’s alma mater.

# 69 March 21, 1937
Joe McCluskey, running for the New York AC, wins the 2-mile steeplechase in 9:59.5 at the Met AAU, breaking the meet record of 10:11.4 from 1926. (There were barriers, no water.) Later in the evening he won the 3-mile and anchored the club’s sprint medley relay team. In 1932, McCluskey, a Fordham grad, set the world record in the 3,000-meter steeplechase and later won the bronze medal in the Olympic Games.

#70 - Feb. 2, 1973

In the midst of a memorable season in which he broke meet records in nine races ranging from 880 yards to 2 miles (he won 7 of the 9), Peter Gaughn (Nazareth, N.Y.) won the mile at the Iona Invitational in 4:13.1. That stood as the Armory record until Alan Webb broke it 28 years later.

#71 - Feb. 24, 2008
Bobby Curtis of Villanova runs 8:02.91 to win the 3,000-meter run at the Big East Championships, held for the first time ever at the Armory. Curtis went on to win the outdoor 5,000-meter title at the NCAA Championships in June. Earlier in ’08, he ran 7:50.17 at the Armory, the year’s fastest indoor time. The UConn Huskies won both the men’s and women’s Big East team titles.

#72 - Feb. 15, 2003
Neisha Bernard-Thomas of LSU won the New Balance Collegiate women’s 800 over Marian Burnett of LSU and Kenia Sinclair of Seton Hall. Five years later, all three ran in the Olympic 800 in Beijing, running for three different countries. Bernard-Thomas, a Tilden HS graduate, broke the national record for her native Grenada, running 2:00.09 in the heats; Burnett, running for Guyana, was in her 2nd Olympics, at age 32; Sinclair, running for Jamaica, made the final, finishing 6th. Burnett remains the Guyanese national recordholder (1:59.47), Sinclair the same for Jamaica (1:57.88).

#73 Jan. 4, 1964
Ed Bowes of Manhattan College wins the Met AAU Juniors 3-mile in 14:48.2, breaking the meet record of 14:54.0, set a year earlier by Norb Sander of Fordham. Bowes went on to become the longtime, legendary coach of Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn and director of the annual Loughlin Games and Manhattan College Invitational.

Dr. Sander went on to win a New York City marathon and later became president of the Armory. Meet records were also set that January day by Tom Farrell of St. John’s (2:12.3 1,000 yards) and Charles Mays of the Grand Street Boys (31.4 300y). Farrell made two Olympic finals in the 800, winning the bronze medal in 1968, the same years Mays made the team in the long jump.

ENLARGE PICTURE

A Young Ed Bowes leads a young Dr. Norbert Sander here at The Armory. Bowes is wearing his Manhattan singlet while Dr. Sander has the Fordham uniform on.

#74 Feb. 13, 1965
Otis Hill runs 31.2 to set a national high school record for 300 yards, defeating Vince Matthews (Jackson, Queens), who ran 31.6, at the NYU Games. Hill later helped White Plains (N.Y.) High School set national records outdoors in the 880 and mile relays. In 1972, Matthews won the Olympic championship in the 400 meters.

#75 Jan. 5, 1957
Unsung Dennis Gatto of NYU won the Met AAU 600y in 1:12.5, defeating Tom Courtney (1:12.9), who was just back from winning the 800-meter gold medal in Melbourne; Steve Bartold (1:13.2) of St. John’s, the future coach at his alma mater and Yale, and Manhattan College’s Tom Murphy. Former Villanova star Fred Dwyer won the mile, then finished 2nd in the 3-mile to Horace Ashenfelter, the 1952 Olympic steeplechase champion.

#76 March 11, 1921
Walter Higgins of Columbia wins the John W. Overton Cup, winning the 2-mile in 9:34.8 over Max Bohland, a past national cross-country champion, at the 2nd Division Indoor Games. Overton, a Yale graduate, had been killed in the Great War 3 years earlier. Two reigning Olympic champions won events that day: Earl Thomson of Dartmouth won the 70-yard hurdles in 9.4, Allen Woodring of Syracuse the 70-yard dash in 7.6. Syracuse won the mile relay in 3:29.2, Yale the 2-mile relay in 8:00.8, both among the fastest indoor performances ever.

#77 Feb. 14, 2004
Villanova wins the women’s DMR in 11:12.31, beginning a 3-year string of victories at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational, all of them anchored by Marina Muncan. In ’05 Muncan ran down the great freshman from North Carolina, Brie Felnagle, to pull out victory 11:05.23-11:05.31,with Stanford 3rd (11:07.81). In ’06 it was ‘Nova over UNC again, 11:05.08-11:05.41, with Baylor 3rd (11:07.72).

#78 - March 2, 2002
Tim Mack clears 18-9 ¼ to win the USATF pole vault and set an Armory record. Two years later, Mack won the Olympic gold medal in Athens.

#79 Feb. 28, 2003
Aliann Pompey sets the Guyanese national indoor record for 400 meters, running 52.17 at the NYU FastTrack meet. A year later she set the outdoor record of 50.93, a time she equaled in the Olympic semifinals in Beijing in 2008. Pompey had an extraordinary record, competing in 3 Olympics and 7 World Championships for Guyana. She won the NCAA indoor championship in 2000 for Manhattan College and won the Commonwealth Games 400 in 2002. In January 2006 she ran 1:09.55 for 500 meters, setting an Armory record that still stands.

#80 March 26, 1949
Mae Faggs sets world and American records in the 220, running 25.9 at the AAU National Championships. Faggs, running for the Police Athletic League, was a student at Bayside-Queens at the time.

Faggs (pictured at right in the front) ran for the U.S. in the ’48, ’52 and ’56 Olympics, winning a gold medal in the 4x1 in 1952 in Helsinki. In college, Faggs was one of the legendary Ed Temple’s first stars at Tennessee State.

#81 Feb. 22, 1961
Bill Boyle (Chaminade) becomes the first high school athlete to break 50 seconds for the indoor 440, running 49.9 at the CHSAA Brooklyn-Queens borough champs.

#82 Jan. 20, 1945
The Columbia Midshipmen School wins the Senior Mets. Although World War II still raged, track and field resumed at the Armory for the first time since 1937, a sign of optimism about the war’s prospects even though V-J Day was seven months away.

Jimmy Herbert, running for the Grand Street Boys, won his 5th consecutive 600, defeating one of the Callender twins, Maurice, of NYU, while Jimmy Rafferty of the NYAC won the mile. In one of the first women’s competitions held in the building, Nancy Cowperthwaite of the German-American A.C. won the 60-yard dash. Earlier in the day, the men’s long jump, shot put and weight throw were held on South Field, in the middle of the Columbia University campus. The snow had to be piled to the side to make room for those competitions.

#83 Jan. 16, 1965
The Atoms TC team of Sandra Lee, Catherine Johnson, Tina Douglas and Linda Reynolds sets a world record of 1:48.5 in the women’s 880 relay, at the Met AAU. The Atoms lowered that to 1:44.7 in 1971.

#84 Feb. 8, 2008
Lesiba Masheto of Illinois sets the collegiate record in the men’s 500 meters, running 1:00.82 at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational.

#85 March 2, 2002
Shawn Crawford wins the USATF 200 in 20.49, setting an Armory record. Crawford won the Olympic championship in 2004.

#86 Jan. 24, 2004
The National Track & Field Hall of Fame opens to the public at the Armory. After languishing in storage crates in West Virginia and Indiana, some of the sport’s most important artifacts finally go on display for all to see. A multimillion-dollar fund-raising project raised the money needed to create the museum. The New York Road Runners also contributed to the project with creation of the Marathon Room, honoring the history of the New York City Marathon. Among those in attendance were Hal Davis, Al Oerter, Chandra Cheeseborough, Frank Shorter, Billy Mills, Bob Beamon, Alberto Salazar, John Carlos, Ron Laird, Louise Tricard, Larry James and Don Bragg.

#87 Feb. 21, 1925
Augustus Moore of Boys High sets the national high school record in the mile, running 4:32.0 at the DeWitt Clinton Games. In 1926 he lowered the record to 4:31.0

#88 Feb. 5, 2005
Caroline Bierbaum of Columbia University wins the New Balance Collegiate 5k in 15:52.17, setting a meet record. Bierbaum, a New York City native, was runnerup in three NCAA championship races – the indoor 5k, outdoor 10k and cross country – and was Ivy League 10k champion, running 32:44.51 in ’05.

# 89 Jan. 22, 1966
Marty Liquori (Essex Catholic, Newark NJ) wins the mile at the St. Francis Prep Games in 4:16.9 to set a national high school flat-floor record. A month later Liquori ran a 1:55.5 anchor to help his school set the flat-floor 2-mile-relay record (7:53.7). In his senior season, 1967, Liquori broke 4 minutes in the mile – to this day one of only four boys to do it -- and anchored Essex Catholic to victory and a national high school record in the distance medley relay at the Penn Relays, before going on to a brilliant career at Villanova University.

#90 March 22, 1930
George Spitz (Flushing HS/Queens) sets the national high school record of 6-4 ½ in the boys high jump, at the General Wingate Games. Spitz made the 1932 U.S. Olympic team and set the world record indoors three times.

#91 Feb. 9, 2002
Seth Hejny of Stanford wins the men’s 3,000 meters over Ryan Hayden of Villanova at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational. In an unusual circumstance, one of the other runners in the race was Hayden’s coach, the miler Marcus O’Sullivan, who was 40 years old at the time. For O’Sullivan, who won the World Indoor 1,500 3 times and competed in 4 Olympic Games, it was his Armory debut.

www.WingedFootFotos.com

#92 Jan. 30, 1954
Tom Murphy (St. Augustine, Brooklyn) sets the national high school record for 600 yards, running 1:14.0 at the NYU Interscholastic, to break his own record of 1:14.1 set 2 weeks earlier.

Murphy made the 1960 U.S. Olympic team at 800 meters, was a star half miler for Manhattan College and ran on a world-record-setting 2-mile-relay team.

#93 Feb. 2, 2007
Brie Felnagle anchors North Carolina to victory in the women’s DMR at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational in 11:04.63 to set the Armory record. A month later, UNC won the NCAA Championship in the event. That June Felnagle won the NCAA outdoor 1,500. As a freshman in 2006, Felnagle won the mile at the NB meet, leading Dennis Craddock’s Tarheels to a surprise victory in the team championship by 1 point. In ’08 she won the NB 3,000.

#94 John McDonell 1971
John McDonnell, an Irish emigre running for the NYAC, runs 14:16.0 in the 3-mile. McDonnell later moved to Arkansas and became the winningest coach in NCAA championship history.

#95
Steve Williams wins the 300 for Evander Childs (Bronx) in 32.1 in ‘71, runs for the NY Pioneers in the winter of ’72 before moving to El Paso where he runs 44.9 that spring, 9.1 for 100 yards a year later and 19.8 in 1975. Although he never made an Olympic team, the tall, graceful Williams was one of the world’s best sprinters throughout the decade. OLD ARTICLE HERE

#96 - March 28, 1914
E. Ballistier Jr. of Morris HS in the Bronx sets the national high school record in the 880, running 2:04.8 at the DeWitt Clinton Games. It is believed to be the first national high school record set in the building. A year later at the Hamilton Games, Ballistier set the national record in the 600 yards, running 1:17.6, and ran a leg on the national-record-setting mile relay team, as Morris ran 3:35.4.

# 97 - March 3, 1928
Sabin Carr of Yale sets the IC4A meet record in the pole vault, clearing13-3 ¾. In May 1927, Carr set the world record when he became the first man to clear 14-0 outdoors. In the summer of 1928, Carr won the Olympic championship.

#98 - Jan. 30, 1925
Willie Plant walks to a world record of 7:37.2 for 1 1/8 miles, at the Morningside AC Games. Plant was a member of the 1920 U.S.Olympic team and broke his own record. In other events that evening, two of history’s greatest distance runners, fellow

Finns Willie Ritola and Paavo Nurmi, won separate events. Ritola, winner of multiple gold medals in both the ’24 and ’28 Olympics, won the 2-mile in 9:10.8, just 2 seconds off the world record; his more renowned teammate, Nurmi, won the 1 1/8-mile run in 5:19.4. Later that winter, Plant defeated the reigning Olympic walk champion, Ugo Frigerio of Italy, at several distances.

#99 - Oct. 28, 1993
The Armory Track & Field Center opens, beginning a new chapter in the building’s long history as a place for track athletes from all over the New York City area to train and compete. The building had been closed for nearly a decade and converted into a shelter for several thousand homeless men. For a time in the 1980s, meets were held with youngsters running on the old flat 220-yard board track while men’s cots were stacked on the infield. After several years of that, the building was closed to kids. There was no central training place left in the city, and meets were relegated to college tracks at West Point, Fordham, Manhattan and others.

In the early 1990s, after a protracted campaign by Dr. Norbert Sander and his friend, Michael Frankfurt, the shelter was relocated to a 168th Street entrance, and then-Mayor David Dinkins gave the keys to the building to the Armory Foundation. “Every window was broken. All the plumbing was broken. We found hermits living in the corners,” Dr. Sander said. By autumn 1993, the building had been scrubbed and a new Mondo track put down. The CHSAA, PSAL and MAC all scheduled meets and practice. A new era had begun. The only other closure in the building’s history was for World War II.

#100 - Jan. 10, 1914
The Xavier Games, the first track meet held in the building, are contested before several thousand spectators, 2 years after the building opened and 5 years after the cornerstone was laid, at the intersection of 168th Street and Fort Washington Avenue, on the spot where Highlander Field, the first home of the New York Yankees baseball club, once sat. The building was the new home of the National Guard’s 22nd Regiment, which had moved uptown from its previous home at 67th Street and Columbus Avenue. In that first meet, wearing rubber-soled shoes, Abel Kiviat, of Staten Island, the reigning Olympic silver medalist in the 1,500 meters, won the feature race of the evening, the 880-yard run, in 1:59.6, defeating, among others, Mel Sheppard, the 1908 Olympic champion. At the time, Kiviat was the world indoor record holder in the mile run (4:18.2 in 1913).

Hilltop Park, The NY Yankees first stadium, was located between 165th and 168th streets and Broadway.

Park History Here

Compiled by Jack Pfeifer of the Armory staff, with generous assistance from Larry Byrne, Ed Grant, Dave Johnson, Marc Bloom, Bill Miller, Walt Murphy and Dr. Al Thompson.

100 Greatest Moments in Armory History