HOLLYWOOD — The route map went up online on Monday, and by that afternoon the merchant group chats along the Boulevard had already split into the people counting customers and the people counting the hours their delivery trucks would be locked out.
Organizers confirmed this week that next spring’s marathon will again route runners — about twenty thousand of them — down roughly a mile and a half of Hollywood Boulevard before the course bends south toward downtown. Run in the cool of a March morning, the Hollywood leg has come and gone from the course over the years. Its return revives a debate the neighborhood stages each time the map is redrawn.
For businesses that can catch the crowd, the morning is a windfall. Cafes, breakfast spots, and anyone selling coffee to spectators tend to have one of their best days of the year.
“We do a month of Sundays in one morning,” said Beatriz Nolasco, who runs a coffee-and-pastry counter a block off the course. “I bring in extra staff, I bake double, and we sell out by ten. The runners’ families stand around for hours with nothing to do but eat. I love the marathon. I wish it came twice.”
Others spend the day locked behind barricades. The closures go up before dawn and, on the affected blocks, don’t fully clear until early afternoon, cutting off vehicle access for anyone who depends on it.
“A supply truck can’t reach my kitchen until two o’clock, so I lose lunch service and half my dinner prep,” said Idris Whitfield, who owns a sit-down restaurant on a side street inside the closure zone. “The spectators don’t come to me. They want a muffin and a bathroom, not a two-hour meal. For me it’s just a day I can’t operate, and I still pay the rent on it.”
Race organizers say the economic case for the city is settled — an independent study last year put the marathon’s regional spending in the tens of millions — and note that they publish closure times months ahead so businesses can plan. This year they have promised earlier signage and a hotline for merchants who need a delivery window worked out.
That has not fully calmed the side streets. A merchants’ association representative said the group had asked, again, for the course to run one block north, off the heaviest concentration of restaurants. Organizers said the current route is fixed for logistical reasons involving the turn toward downtown and is unlikely to move.
There is a middle camp, too, of merchants who neither cash in nor lose out and mostly want the day over with. A hardware-store owner on the route said he simply closes and takes his family to watch. “Once a year the Boulevard belongs to people on foot instead of cars,” he said. “I can give it one Sunday.”
The race is still eight months off. For now the map is just a red line on a screen, and the two halves of the Boulevard are already rehearsing the argument they will have again in March, one side stocking up on flour, the other rescheduling its trucks.