Art Beresheim

For the last 7 years I have been the Production Manager for the Tunnel to Towers Race in New York City. I manage the start line side of the race in Red Hook Brooklyn. If you are not familiar with the race, it recreates the journey of NY Firefighter Steven Siller who ran through the Battery Tunnel to the Twin Towers on September 11th. It’s a great event that I am proud to be apart of for so long. Seeing the firefighters start the race in their full gear makes the long hours in the cold rain worth it. More info about the race can be found here.

Now I am not going to go into a lot of details about the race for security reasons, but I am in charge of everything in regards to the delivery, and set up of all the equipment. Which includes booms, generators, golf carts, lifts, stages, trussing, porto-potties, LED Walls, Audio, Video Playback & Cameras. I also work along side the NYPD and our private security in the install location of all the security fencing, and traffic jersey barriers. We set up LED walls and Line arrays down 6 blocks for the runners before they start the race, so they can see everything that is happening on the stage. Usually have some high profile speakers, a music act or two, and we also work with the local news who always covers the event. One thing I am desperate to find, I lost a photo of me shuttling Rudy Giuliani in a golf cart after he spoke on stage!

The jersey barriers specifically are always a challenge. I used to have to manage about 50 west point cadets to unload and then repack the barriers after the race. However one year, they didn’t show up for the load out. So in the rain me and few others and I had to fork lift as many as we could into the semi trailer. Unfortunately since there were only a few of us, we had to leave some behind and pay a fine to the company to have them pick them up the following day because we could not lift and stack them appropriately. So now we utilize the West Point cadets, as well as hired help so we do not get stuck in that situation again. See the pic of how these big jersey barriers are loaded high and tight in this semi.