Norbert Sander remembers his awe at first seeing the Armory, a grand Neoclassic brick building in Washington Heights. He was 13 at the time.

“I walked in – it was an enormous place – and it was filled with smoke, because the coaches all smoked, and they wore overcoats and fedoras.”

He raced on its track when he was a high school student at Fordham Prep, then later as a scholarship athlete Fordham University.

The memory of that first sight never left him. He attended medical school, then set up practice at City Island in the Bronx, still running 10 miles each morning. He became so adept a runner that in 1974 he won the New York City Marathon, the only New York City native – still to this day – to have finished first.

As Sander was reaching his heyday in running, the Armory was falling apart. After an injured runner came to see him and in passing asked, “Do you know anyone who can help us? The Armory has become a homeless shelter,” Sander decided to act.

He formed a group with a few movers and shakers, including the head of the New York Road Runners, the deputy mayor and a state government official. They started writing to newspapers and others with influence. And after years away, Sander made a visit to the Armory.

“It was overwhelming,” he said. “The stench was horrendous. Mayhem, murder, people sick, people mentally ill and talking to themselves, and out-and-out criminals preying on them.”

Sander refused to become discouraged. He dragged city officials to the Armory, moving a bed or two to reveal the track’s rim carved into the wood of the floor. After a class-action suit and energetic lobbying, Sander was given the key to the building.

“I said to myself, ‘Geez, what am I going to do now?’ Every window was broken, and there were rats running through it.”

The Armory began taking income from track meets, started receiving money from private donors, figured out how capital grants worked, and “little by little, brick by brick,” Sander brought the Armory back.

Now it is one of the foremost indoor track and field facilities in the world. More than 125,000 young people run there each year; it welcomes more than 400,000 visitors annually. Their Armory College Prep after school program is among the largest in the city, providing hands on counseling, a writing institute and a middle school program open to all New York City students.

“They come for the track, they come for the academics, and some of them have to ride an hour and half out to Brooklyn,” he said. “Some kids are coming with damaged backgrounds. We stay with them.”

Sander raised millions to save the Armory, which has been awarded National Historic Landmark status. “People always say to me, ‘Did you ever dream it would get like this?’ And I say that I never though it couldn’t be. We had a vision, and there are a thousand people who contribute to this success. All of them are important. They’re saints.”