Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Deputy Mayors Howard Wolfson and Patricia E. Harris all argued for calling off the event.

The mayor, virtually alone in saying the race should go on, finally relented and canceled it after a conversation with Mary Wittenberg, the marathon director, late Friday. “This isn’t the year or the time to run it,” she said.

Patience also wore thin in other parts of the New York area amid lines that were once again painfully long — lines for free meals, lines for buses to take people where crippled subways could not, lines for gasoline that stretched 30 blocks in Brooklyn.

Hand-lettered signs in hard-hit areas struck a plaintive note: “FEMA please help us,” read one in Broad Channel, Queens. In Hoboken, N.J., one was addressed to Gov. Chris Christie: “Gov. Chris — where is the help $$$$”

Ethel Liebeskind of Merrick, N.Y., echoed that idea as she stood in the storm-tossed ruins of the house she had lived in for 26 years. “This is as bad as Katrina,” she said, “and they got global attention. The South Shore of Long Island should be treated the same way. Don’t forget us on the South Shore of Long Island. We need help.”

There was more grim news on Staten Island, where rescuers pulled two bodies from another house in the Midland Beach neighborhood, about two miles from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Neighbors who had been hauling their ruined furniture and trash to the street watched as two body bags were taken out of a house on Olympia Boulevard.

The two victims were not immediately identified. They brought to 41 the official count of people who died as rampaging wind drove a wall of water into the city on Monday night.