MTAR Crew Bringing New York City Running to East Harlem

Where El Barrio Meets the Open Road

East Harlem has always told its story through its streets. Murals the size of buildings mark the corners of Third Avenue. The smell of pernil drifts from open storefronts on a Tuesday evening. Salsa still bleeds through apartment windows. This is the neighbourhood that George Grullon chose as the home of MTAR Crew, and the choice was not accidental. It was a declaration. East Harlem, known to its residents simply as El Barrio, is one of the most historically and culturally significant neighbourhoods in all of New York City. It carries the weight of generations of Puerto Rican, Dominican, and broader Latino life in America. Bringing a running crew into that landscape was never just about logging miles. It was about planting something meaningful in a place that already had deep roots. George founded MTAR Crew in July 2016 with a clear intention: to carry the energy and fellowship of New York City's broader running community into a corner of the city that had not always been part of that conversation. El Barrio deserved to be on the map, not just as a place runners pass through, but as a place where runners belong.

A Neighbourhood That Runs Deep

To understand MTAR Crew, you have to understand East Harlem itself. Stretching roughly from 96th Street to 142nd Street on the east side of Manhattan, the neighbourhood has long been a mecca for Hispanic culture in New York. Its streets hold decades of art history, music history, and community history that most of the city's runners have never slowed down long enough to absorb. The legacy of Latin jazz and boogaloo, the legacy of the Young Lords, the murals of Jorge Soto Sánchez and the artists of the Taller Boricua, the Saturday markets on Park Avenue that have fed families for generations; all of this is the backdrop against which MTAR Crew runs. George grew up knowing what this neighbourhood means. He did not start a crew despite that complexity. He started one because of it. Running through East Harlem is itself an education. Every block holds a reference to something larger than the sport. When you run these streets as part of MTAR Crew, you are not just covering ground. You are moving through living history, and that changes the rhythm of everything.

George Grullon and the Vision Behind the Crew

George Grullon is the founder and captain of MTAR Crew, and the throughline between those two roles tells you something important about how the crew operates. He did not hand the reins to someone else once the group was up and running. He stayed on the ground, kept showing up on Tuesday evenings, and continued to lead not from a distance but from the front of the pack. His Instagram presence under the handle gnp_photos gives a sense of how he sees the world, with a photographer's eye for the textures and stories that most people miss. That same sensibility shapes how MTAR Crew engages with its neighbourhood. The crew does not move through East Harlem indifferently. It pays attention. George's instinct was always to create something that honoured the place rather than simply used it as a backdrop. That instinct has guided the crew since its earliest days and continues to define its character. Running crews in New York are not a rare thing. The city has dozens of them, and many are excellent. But a crew built specifically to root itself in El Barrio, led by someone who understands what that neighbourhood means culturally and personally, occupies a distinct place in the city's running landscape.

Tuesday Nights at Revolutionary Fitness

The crew gathers every Tuesday evening at seven o'clock at Revolutionary Fitness, the East Harlem gym that serves as the crew's headquarters and home base. There is something fitting about a space called Revolutionary Fitness anchoring a crew that was itself a kind of small revolution, bringing a running community to a neighbourhood that the broader New York running scene had largely overlooked. Tuesday evenings carry a particular energy in El Barrio. The workday is winding down, the streets are filling up, and the neighbourhood hums with the kind of life that makes New York worth running through. Starting a run from Revolutionary Fitness and heading out into those streets as a group is an experience that is hard to replicate anywhere else in the city. The route changes, but the feeling does not. You are running with people who chose this neighbourhood on purpose, who show up week after week because the place means something to them. The Tuesday run is the crew's anchor, the consistent commitment around which everything else orbits.

Small Crew, Real Presence

MTAR Crew numbers around fifteen members, and that size is not incidental. A crew of fifteen is small enough that everyone knows everyone, that a new face is immediately noticed and welcomed, that the group can move through East Harlem with the kind of cohesion that allows for actual conversation mid-run. There is no anonymity in a crew this size. You show up, and you are seen. You miss a Tuesday, and someone asks where you were the following week. That accountability is not pressure. It is the natural result of a group small enough to actually function as a community rather than just a crowd wearing matching shirts. The members who run with MTAR Crew are drawn together not just by the sport but by an affinity for East Harlem and for the values George embedded in the crew from the beginning. Running here is an act of neighbourhood pride as much as it is an athletic endeavour. The crew carries that with it every time it steps out of Revolutionary Fitness and onto the block.

Running as an Act of Community

George started MTAR Crew because he saw a gap. New York City's running scene was and remains vibrant, sprawling, and genuinely diverse. But the geography of that scene tended to cluster around certain parks, certain boroughs, certain neighbourhoods with long-established running infrastructure. East Harlem was not typically part of that geography, and George believed it should be. Bringing a crew to El Barrio was a way of saying that this neighbourhood, with all its history and culture and community, deserved a running crew of its own. Not a crew that would visit occasionally, but one that would live there, be rooted there, and represent the neighbourhood in the broader running world. That intention has held. MTAR Crew is not a crew that happens to meet in East Harlem out of logistical convenience. It is a crew that is of East Harlem, shaped by the neighbourhood's character and committed to being a consistent, visible part of its community life. Every Tuesday run is a small expression of that commitment, one that has repeated itself week after week since the summer of 2016.

An Open Door on Tuesday Evenings

If you have been looking for a reason to run East Harlem, MTAR Crew is that reason. The crew meets every Tuesday at seven in the evening at Revolutionary Fitness, and the door is open to runners who want to be part of something rooted in one of New York City's most remarkable neighbourhoods. The pace and the distance matter less than the intention. What MTAR Crew offers is a run that means something, through streets that have something to say, with people who chose this place deliberately. George Grullon built this crew to bring the NYC running community to El Barrio, and after nearly a decade of Tuesday evenings, that work continues. Follow along on Instagram at mtar_crew to see where the crew is running and what El Barrio looks like from the inside. Show up on a Tuesday and find out for yourself what it means to run in a neighbourhood that has always had something worth running for.