Albert Arroyo, the 'Mayor of Central Park' — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis said to him, 'Call me Jackie'

Nearly 90, Albert Arroyo (above, stretching) said, to Dan Barry in a story in yesterday's New York Times, "I am the first man to run in Central Park."'

Barry noted that no one has yet come forth to challenge Arroyo.

Back in the mid–1930s, when he was a young boxer from Puerto Rico, he began running on the 1.6–mile path around Central Park now used by thousands of people every day.

Time passes.

Arroyo stopped running about 10 years ago, in his late 70s.

Now he walks to and from the park daily.

Here's the article.

The Mayor Who Ran, Ran and Ran

THE mayor of Central Park lives in an S.R.O. on the Upper West Side.

His one room has an unkempt bed, two small dressers that belong on the curb, lumps of clothes on the worn carpet, and a rusted hotplate that he means to throw out.

The telephone permits him to dial only 911.

Decorations are spare.

They include a dusty State Senate resolution from 1985 that honors him for his contributions to the park, and an autographed poster of Grete Waitz, the nine-time New York City Marathon champion, that brightens the peeled-paint wall.

"Keep up the good work," she wrote.

The mayor, Alberto Arroyo, says he has lived here for nearly a quarter-century because it reflects the simplicity he has sought for most of his nearly 90 years.

He has taken a vow of poverty, he says, like St. Francis of Assisi.

"You've heard of St. Francis of Assisi?" he asks.

He wears clothes that should be cleaned or tossed.

He eats one meal a day, usually the lunch served at a local senior center, as long as it is not the oxtail or the knockwurst.

He survives on Social Security and a modest pension from his old employer, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, but will not touch his savings because it is to be given away once he dies.

And he lives here.

"Everyone wants the maximum," he says.

"I want the minimum."

The mayor's true home, his Gracie Mansion, is Central Park, where he needs to be right now.



Wearing a "mayor" cap over his sparse white hair and a coaster-size medallion around his neck, he pushes his four-wheeled walker toward the door.

Slowly.

Mr. Arroyo was once a trailblazing runner.

Back in the mid-1930's, when he was a young boxer from Puerto Rico with a radical sense of physical fitness, he began running on the 1.6-mile path that encircles the Central Park Reservoir.

Now, thousands jog there every day.

"I am the first man to run in Central Park," he says, a claim that no one bothers to challenge.

But there is no question that in a city reluctant to wave hello, he became an identifiable, approachable character: the guy at the reservoir, the one with the white mustache, running, standing on his head, posing for tourists, forever sharing the many stories of Alberto Arroyo.

How he stowed away on a ship; ran bare-chested in winter; defied a rapacious landlord to win rights for tenants; raised money to make this crushed-stone track what it is today; on and on.

Along the way he also became almost a spiritual presence, one with the park - "a constant," says George Hirsch, board chairman of the New York Road Runners club.

Mr. Arroyo stopped running a decade ago, reluctantly.

Now he takes a good 20 minutes to walk the three blocks to the park, and another 10 to reach the reservoir's path.

He shuffles counterclockwise on the trail, the better to fulfill his ambassadorial duties.

As he moves north, nodding and saying hello to runners - "Hi, Mayor," they call - he recites stories that he has told too many times before.

Still, when he tells them, it is as though one of the old London plane trees at the reservoir were given voice.

Mr. Arroyo says he was there, for example, when a man removed his clothes, neatly folded them on the shore, and swam into the reservoir to drown.

He was there when the police hung yellow tape around the spot where Robert Chambers left the body of young Jennifer Levin.

He was there when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis [below, running with Arroyo]



began looping the reservoir many years ago, and there when she visited the park a few days before she died, in 1994.

By then they had become acquaintances.

Mr. Arroyo remembers many things she said to him, especially this: "Call me Jackie."

He continues along the path, talking about Jackie, and St. Francis, and Alberto Arroyo.

"My time is up," he says. "People tell me, 'You're going to live another 10, 20 years.' Baloney.

But nobody should be afraid to die because you keep living. You just go from one apartment to another."

Mr. Arroyo sits on a bench dedicated to him near the South Gate House.

It is the desk to his open-air office.

People jogging by call out to him, while a boy one bench over slips carefully out of school clothes and into running shorts.

Sunlight is giving way to shadow.

The boy runs off, but the mayor says he will stay until dark.