Last Days at the Aqueduct: New York’s Rundown Racetrack

Courtesy of Max Callimanopulos. The first one thousand fans through the gates of the Aqueduct Racetrack on the last Sunday of June received a commemorative vial of track dirt. I arrived too late to claim mine, but I spotted several as I walked out to the grandstand. A few old men clutched them tightly while watching the races. Others used them as paperweights to keep their stacks of betting slips from blowing away. “Magic charm,” said a man in a Vietnam War Veteran hat, flashing his little jar at me. After 132 years, the Aqueduct Racetrack was closing. Some lucky people would leave with a bit of it in their pockets. That Sunday, the track was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. The grandstand was jammed. The apron—the bit of asphalt that fronts the track—was overflowing with spectators. The line for concessions snaked through the betting hall. A steel drum band, playing bright, mournful music, greeted the throng filtering through the front doors. This must be the most people the Aqueduct had hosted in months, I said to an elfin woman eating a hot dog. She corrected me: This is the most people to have come here in years. When I’d first started visiting the track this past spring, the place felt forgotten and in gentle decay. The upper levels of the grandstand were a pigeon roost; the clientele was aging. I was the youngest man there—and the regulars were almost exclusively male—by twenty years. Still, something about the place suited me. I’d abruptly quit the Peace Corps and found myself back in the city with no job and not much in my bank account. The Aqueduct was free to enter and easy to get to. Inside, I felt myself in good company. Nobody here was at work; nobody asked me why I wasn’t either. I could take a seat in the sun and watch the horses stream by. *** During its heyday in the midsixties, the Aqueduct was the world’s largest racetrack. Renovations in 1959 added a total capacity for eighty thousand patrons, sixty-two bars and buffets, and even a twenty-five-bed hospital. On weekends, an express train—the “Aqueduct Special”—shuttled racegoers between Times Square and the track. In 1981, the Equestris restaurant opened in a bid to attract high rollers to the racetrack. The Times, covering the opening, noted the restaurant’s twelve hundred trackside seats, “lounges with red-velour couches,” and its dress code: no jeans, “designer or otherwise.” I’d taken the stairs up to the Equestris once—the escalator had been out of order. The red velour was long gone, ripped off the couches, and the seats had been arranged in orderly lines across the restaurant floor, ready to be moved out. The bar was crowded with moldering cardboard boxes and upturned plastic tables. A row of defunct ATMs was pushed against the back wall. Chunks of drywall lay scattered across the carpeting. Sitting outside, a sunspotted old man described crowds of forty thousand that used to flood the track every weekend. “We all used to dress for this,” he said. “Suit and tie and we used to wear hats—everyone in a hat. We called them fedoras back then. You probably never heard of a fedora.” I told him I had heard of a fedora. “Everything changes,” he croaked at me. “You’ll see. Everything changes.” Fedoras had since been abandoned in favor of ball caps; those crowds of forty thousand had thinned to a few hundred. The Aqueduct was closing because the New York Racing Association (NYRA) had decided to consolidate downstate racing at Belmont Park, just over the city limits in Nassau County. The Resorts World New York City casino—which opened on the Aqueduct’s grounds in 2011—would remain standing next door. NYRA was spending $455 million on a sleek, glass-enclosed grandstand at Belmont and another $100 million on rebuilding its tracks. When the revamped racetrack opens in September, an article in BloodHorse promises, “the racing world will be introduced to a new, more modern era of racing in New York.” The irony here is that the Aqueduct itself was once the upscale replacement for a scruffier track. The renovations carried out in 1959 were meant to supplant the Jamaica Racetrack, a few miles east, whose archetypal fan, William H. P. Robertson wrote in The History of Thoroughbred Racing in America, was “intensely loyal” and “a breed unto himself: a raucous, aggressive creature, notorious for the audibility of his observations.” Robertson, writing in 1964, went on to observe that while the freshly reopened Aqueduct had “not been without its detractors,” the new track—a “gleaming monster,” as he put it—might someday “acquire a sentimental following of its own.” The track’s sentimental following was out in full force on Sunday. A tall man named Carl told me, in a lilting accent I couldn’t quite place, that he would miss the Aqueduct’s “atmosphere.” “We come here, we yell and curse at the horses, the jockey, the owners. But we don’t mean none of it.” A few minutes later, when a chestnut filly named Fairy Godmother came in sixth, I watched a mild-looking white guy lean over the paddock railing. “Hey Dylan, fuck you!” The jockey didn’t look up. “Son of a bitch just made me lose fifty dollars,” he said, looking around at us sheepishly. Amid the crowds, there was no shortage of old timers happy to tell you about the first time they came here, about the great races they had seen (Secretariat’s record-setting mile in the 1973 Gotham Stakes; Cigar’s seven-length win in ’94), about their dads who brought them (a lot about dads, I found). But the diehards I talked to—the fans stalking around with marked-up copies of the Daily Racing Program stuffed into their cargo shorts—seemed to accept the Aqueduct’s closure with admirable equanimity. “Right after this I’m going to Saratoga for the summer,” a man named Lou told me. “I go where the horses go.” Others were less mobile. “Don’t care about the betting,” said Chuck, a soft-spoken Trini man. “I’m just here to watch. When it closes, I just stay home. Make the miss happy.” Mike, in his eighties, had given up on the sport entirely. “I’m not going to Belmont when this place is finished. I’m done. I mean, I don’t even look at the races anymore. I just pick a number,” he said, sounding exhausted. So why did anyone still bother coming? Betting was a crapshoot and the Aqueduct was rotting. It seemed in worse repair every weekend I visited. Big flakes of paint dangled off the girders and puddles of green mold adorned the bathroom sinks. But when I first saw the horses coming down the homestretch, I thought they were the most beautiful thing I’d seen in months. On that final Sunday, the crowd roared for them after every race. The thoroughbreds stood on the track, their chests covered in a greenish lather of dust and sweat, stamping and tossing their manes as they were hosed down. The water gave their coats a sheen, as if they had been lacquered. “They’re just the most lovely animal,” a ninety-one-year-old man gushed. Nine races were scheduled that day, and by the ninth, just before six in the evening, everyone was tipsy and restive. “This will be the last race run at the Aqueduct, folks, the very last race,” the announcer said. A cheer went up. The horses and their jockeys trotted out. But instead of lining up at the gate, they passed it and formed a ring on the track. For a few minutes they walked round and round, nose to tail, as if in a private ceremony. The crowd was quiet. Then one by one they peeled away and found their places on the starting line. A velvety brown gelding named Assume Nothing won the last race, just ahead of Tizmarkus and Sara’s Shaman. After the horses had been hosed down and led back to the stables, a crowd rushed to the chain-link fence at the bottom of the apron. They’d brought their own plastic cups or Ziploc bags; they passed them to the trainers and jockeys on the other side who returned them full of track dirt. “It was a good run,” the announcer kept saying. “It wasn’t the flashiest track, but if you knew the Big A, you loved it.” He bid us goodnight and signed off. “Love You ‘Till the End” by The Pogues sounded out scratchily over the loudspeakers. A man holding a cardboard sign that read “One More Day! Give Me a Chance To Win It Back!” leaned it against the paddock railing and joined the slow stream of people leaving the track. I followed the crowds out of the Aqueduct and into the parking lot, where I paused for a moment, unsure of where to go. I turned right and made for the walkway that led to the casino. The first floor was roped off. Please excuse our appearance, a sign read, we are in the process of adding 1300 new slot machines! On the second floor, the machines were crammed together, forming narrow alleyways and sudden cul-de-sacs. I wandered through, watching the gamblers hammer away at spin buttons. The casino clicked and flashed, pulsing with light and noise. I found a door that led outside onto a terrace. The terrace was long and austere, decorated with a trash can and a plastic sofa. A couple gamblers were pacing grimly, taking quick puffs at their cigarettes. I asked the man nearest me if he had one I could bum. He scowled and handed me a Seneca. “They’re making me lose a lot of money in there tonight,” he complained, jabbing a thumb back at the casino. “Yeah, I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him. “Did you catch the last race at the Aqueduct?” “No,” he said, turning to frown at the track. “That shit is too much luck.” I thanked him and walked over to the railing. The terrace had a good view of the Aqueduct. From here, you could look down into the paddock or see the far turn, where the horses had come charging into the homestretch only a half hour before. I knew I wouldn’t come back here again—not to the casino, not to the track. I’d started a job; those weightless days in April when I’d sit here for a few hours in a happy trance were behind me. By now, the track had almost cleared out. The horses were gone, along with the jockeys and trainers. The crowds had vanished. The jumbotron was dark. Two stable hands were still down in the paddock, mucking out the stalls, and a lone custodian was left on the apron, chasing beer cans across the asphalt. Max Callimanopulos is a writer, whose recent work has appeared in the TLS, N+1, the London Review of Books, and the Red Hook Star-Revue. Last / Next Article Share