In honor of the Brooklyn Half Marathon, we’ve uploaded a portion of a film from the BHS collections, entitled Walking Race: Heel and Toe Artists Hoof it to Coney Island. It shows a group of men race walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as the arrival of the winner in Coney Island. The silent film is from a 16mm reel that was made around 1930 and found at a garage sale in the 1990s. The reel also contains a series of similar (but not Brooklyn-related) newsreel-style clips, all of which were recently conserved and digitized with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Enjoy the clip, and good luck in the race tomorrow!
Walking Race: Heel and Toe Artists Hoof it to Coney Island from Brooklyn Historical Society on Vimeo.