Aqueduct Racetrack Closes After 132 Years, Ending Era of New York City Racing

For the better part of a century, the subway ride to Aqueduct Racetrack followed a familiar rhythm. The closer the train drew to Ozone Park, the more animated the conversations became. Men with folded racing forms debated trip notes, overlays and bombs. Regulars swapped tips while newcomers eavesdropped, hoping to catch a profitable whisper. By the time the doors opened at the Aqueduct-North Conduit Avenue stop, thousands of New Yorkers had arrived at what many considered the city’s most democratic sporting venue.

That ritual took place for the last time on Sunday. After 132 years, Aqueduct hosted its final day of thoroughbred racing before closing for good, marking the end of the last racetrack within New York City limits and a fixture of city life that had endured since the Gilded Age.

The New York Racing Association is consolidating downstate racing at the newly rebuilt Belmont Park in the suburban Long Island hamlet of Elmont, scheduled to reopen in September after a $455m redevelopment. The move has been long expected and reflects the economic realities of a sport reshaped by off-track and online wagering. Yet for generations of horseplayers, trainers, jockeys and racing fans, Aqueduct’s shuttering feels less like a business decision than the loss of a neighborhood institution.

“Aqueduct has always been New York City’s racetrack,” former jockey Richard Migliore, the track’s all-time leading rider with 2,238 victories over a 31-year career, told the Guardian. “It’s part of the boroughs. It’s in Queens.”

Unlike Belmont Park or Saratoga, he said, Aqueduct never felt removed from the city. The patrons there earned a reputation throughout the sport for their candor as much as their expertise. “There’s a grittiness to Aqueduct that you don’t get at Belmont, certainly don’t get at Saratoga. At Aqueduct, you get the real fans. They’re hardcore. They know the game,” Migliore said. “If you made a mistake, they’d let you know about it. But that’s kind of part of New York, right?”

On Sunday’s final day, Aqueduct pulsed with an energy it had not known for years. Longtime patrons, curious first-timers and lapsed fans returning for a last look queued outside hours before the 1.10pm first post, a four-piece band greeted them at the gates and retired track announcer Tom Durkin returned to the microphone for one final call. Lines for the concession stands and betting windows snaked through the concourse as 6,866 people gave the weathered grandstand a fleeting glimpse of its former self. It was a poignant reminder not only of what the Big A had been, but of how much of it had already vanished into the past.

When Aqueduct opened on 27 September 1894, drawing a crowd of about 700 spectators and eight bookmakers for an unsanctioned six-race card, it gave no hint of the long, colorful life that lay ahead. Built on former farmland in what was then a sparsely developed corner of Queens, it lacked the polish of the fashionable Jerome Park and Morris Park racecourses, where New York’s social elite gathered to see and be seen. Early visitors could still glimpse cabbages and potatoes growing in the infield. The original grandstand seated barely 2,000 spectators.

The track was the unlikely creation of three men with no previous ties to horse racing: a Harlem deputy fire chief, an Albany lobbyist and a Brooklyn hotelier, who leased 23 acres of pasture that had once formed part of the old Brooklyn Water Works. The fledgling course took its name from an aqueduct that cut across the property, carrying fresh water from Long Island into Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Future Hall of Fame trainer James “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons, then just 20 years old and attending Aqueduct’s opening meeting in 1894, later joked that the place “looked like a shanty on stilts”. Spectators standing closest to the rail balanced on wooden planks to keep from sinking into the mud. Yet over time, Aqueduct evolved from what some contemporaries dismissed as an “outlaw track” into one of the sport’s most recognizable locales.

Man o’ War raced there. Secretariat made his debut there on the Fourth of July. Cigar launched his record 16-race winning streak there. Seabiscuit, Kelso, Buckpasser, Dr Fager, Forego, Ruffian, Seattle Slew, Easy Goer, Smarty Jones and countless other champions all passed through the Big A.

For five years Aqueduct staged the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel of US horse racing’s Triple Crown, while Belmont Park underwent reconstruction in the 1960s, welcomed the Breeders’ Cup in 1985 and hosted Pope John Paul II’s Mass before an estimated crowd of 75,000 in 1995. Film and television came calling, too. Aqueduct is where Ralph Cifaretto’s star-crossed filly Pie-O-My raced in The Sopranos and where Eddie the Mush spoiled a perfectly good afternoon in A Bronx Tale. It was also, as so many horseplayers will tell, the site of racing’s only triple dead heat in a North American stakes race, when Brownie, Bossuet and Wait A Bit crossed the finish line together in the 1944 Carter Handicap.

Yet Aqueduct’s importance was never measured solely by the equine athletes and revered jockeys who passed through, repeatedly finding itself serving purposes beyond racing. After Superstorm Sandy in 2012, its parking lots became a Red Cross staging area for relief efforts, while parts of the facility sheltered displaced New Yorkers from the underserved South Brooklyn and Queens communities. Nearly a decade later, much of the grandstand was transformed into one of New York’s largest Covid-19 vaccination centers, where more than 300,000 doses were administered during the pandemic.

Migliore, now 62, grew up eight miles away in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay neighborhood and remembers riding the subway to Aqueduct with his father on opening day of each spring meet after the winter break. By the time the sweeping four-tier grandstand came into view, he recalled, the anticipation became almost unbearable.

Arriving at Aqueduct, Migliore said, felt like his first trip to Yankee Stadium as a boy. “You’d get off the train, walk up to the track apron, and suddenly there was this beautiful expanse of green and tobacco brown,” he recalled. “Then the majesty of the horses, the tradition of it all, the jockeys and the colors they were wearing. I was just enamored with the entire scene. It immediately captured my attention.” By the age of 10, he knew he wanted to become a jockey.

Unlike Saratoga, with its summer glamour, or Belmont, with its manicured suburban expanses, Aqueduct built its reputation on accessibility. It sat at the end of the A train line, the last stop before JFK airport, about 12 miles from Times Square. For years, New York City’s transit authority even ran special “Daily Double” express trains directly to the races. Admission was inexpensive when it wasn’t free and the track unmistakably belonged to the outer boroughs.

On any given afternoon, the trackside apron reflected the city itself: retirees from Ozone Park, Richmond Hill and East New York; Caribbean immigrants from southeast Queens; lifelong Brooklyn horseplayers who had ridden the A train for decades; airport workers stopping in after a shift; finance guys escaping Wall Street for the afternoon; and seasoned bettors who knew every trainer and jockey by name. They arrived speaking English, Spanish, Jamaican Patois, Guyanese Creole and a dozen other languages, carrying racing forms under one arm and coffee cups in the other. For many of the regulars, Aqueduct was one of New York City’s last great third spaces: neither home nor work, but an in-between place where people came to gamble, exchange intel, yell at the elevated banks of simulcast screens and catch up with the same familiar faces day after day. It belonged to the same vanishing New York as old lunch counters, corner diners and neighborhood bars: unglamorous institutions that quietly became part of the city’s social fabric.

Stanley Wint, a 69-year-old Canarsie resident who emigrated from Jamaica decades ago, had been coming to Aqueduct for more than 30 years. He fell in love with the sport long before he arrived in New York. As a boy, he followed British racing, idolizing riders like Lester Piggott and Joe Mercer before his mother and uncle introduced him to betting. Aqueduct, he said, eventually became part of that same lifelong routine.

What would disappear, Wint believed, was not simply another racetrack but the community that had grown around it.

“I’m going to miss this place,” he said. “Just the atmosphere and the people, the down-to-earth people. They come. They get upset when their horses lose. They cheer when the horses win. They curse the jockeys, but it’s all fun. The people that are here today, they’re fans, but they’re not here all the time. I’m here Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. I can’t come Saturday because I got something to do.”

Wint said that broad mix of everyday people was what separated Aqueduct from almost anywhere else. “This is the only sport that you’ll see a guy with a walker coming on the train, a guy in a wheelchair or with a cane,” he said. “It’s not just the horses. I love the horses, the jockeys, the whole environment.”

Sunday’s crowd extended well beyond Aqueduct’s regulars. Cori Boudreau, a 72-year-old retired university administrator from Gloucester, Massachusetts, had only visited once before, making the four-hour drive several years ago only to discover the day’s card had been abandoned because of high winds. This time, she and her cousin rode down determined not to miss their last chance. They arrived three hours before post time to claim one of the commemorative mason jars of track dirt promised to the first 1,000 people through the gates.

Boudreau had seen this story before. She watched Suffolk Downs outside Boston and Rockingham Park in New Hampshire close their gates, each another reminder of horse racing’s steadily contracting presence across the northeast. “Every track that closes kind of signals that horse racing is not the sport it once was,” she said. “But it’s probably less bittersweet knowing that there’s a reason for it.”

Like most people, she understood why it was happening. Belmont Park’s redevelopment made little sense alongside another major racetrack just a few miles down the road. What saddened her was everything else that would disappear. “There are people who come here every week and have all their lives,” she said. “It’s a very accessible track. It’s kind of melancholy. It’s a tradition that is going away.”

Aqueduct never let you forget where you were. Every few minutes, an airliner crossed low overhead on final approach to JFK, briefly drowning out the track announcer and any nearby conversation. Seagulls drifted over the infield from nearby Jamaica Bay while pigeons wheeled through the cavernous interior of the grandstand. The faint odor of marijuana often hung over the picnic tables near the one-sixteenth pole, mingling with the smell of cigarette smoke, hot dogs and stale beer. There was no signature cocktail here. Everyone knew the social contract: tuck a newspaper into the seat slats before heading to the windows and your seat would be waiting when you got back. The grandstand itself belonged to another era: a hulking slab of mid-century Brutalist architecture whose exposed concrete, austere lines and unapologetically functional design suited a racetrack that prized utility over ornament.

For Robert Bourget, a 75-year-old retired horseman from Far Rockaway, it simply felt like home. He made the trip to Aqueduct for 62 years, ever since he arrived in New York as a young stablehand from Vermont. He remembers his first day at the track, when he bet $2 to win on one of the horses from his barn and collected $5.20.

“There are people born and raised here who’ve never seen the Empire State Building,” Bourget said, nodding toward the crowd at trackside. By the end Aqueduct belonged to a New York hidden in plain sight, stitched into the routines of generations while remaining largely unseen by the city around it.

That blue-collar identity became part of the track’s mythos. Even as racing attendance declined nationally and New York lost other tracks, Aqueduct carried on. It became a winter home for the sport, most notably after the introduction of the inner dirt track in 1975, which helped make year-round racing in New York possible. On grey frost-hardened afternoons from January to March, Aqueduct became the place horseplayers went simply because the races were running, who came for as much for the company as the $1.75 oxtail soup or clam chowder from the second-floor soup bar. The surface became central to the growth of the state’s breeding industry and provided opportunities for generations of New York-bred horses, trainers and jockeys.

Bourget remembers when that wasn’t possible. Before Aqueduct became New York’s winter home, he said, horsemen routinely packed up each autumn and headed south to Florida or Maryland once Belmont closed. “Aqueduct was really the winter track,” he said, recalling how the venue changed the rhythm of New York racing by allowing the sport to continue through the colder months.

Winter racing also created opportunities for young jockeys. “Aqueduct was always a proving ground for young riders,” said Migliore, now a popular analyst on Fox Sports’ coverage of NYRA racing. “It was a chance for you to get your foothold.”

That role as a proving ground extended well beyond the jockeys’ room. For many participants, Aqueduct was where careers were built rather than showcased. The New York Thoroughbred Breeders recently described the track as a foundational pillar of the state’s breeding program, arguing that no venue played a greater role in establishing New York-bred racing as a sustainable and successful enterprise.

“Aqueduct was never a way station,” Migliore said. “New York racing was always a destination.”

The Big A also served as racing’s constant as the sport was changing. It had reinvented itself before. Between 1955 and 1959, the original track was demolished and rebuilt in a $34.5m renovation, becoming what observers hailed as the most modern racing facility in North America. The Associated Press called it “the world’s most modern and luxurious horse plant”, while the New York Times dubbed it “New York’s Circus Maximus”. The rebuilt track drew 42,473 people for its reopening in September 1959, with an opening-day betting handle of $3,430,765 (nearly $40m in today’s dollars), a monument to racing’s post-war confidence and the belief that ever-larger crowds lay ahead.

As other urban racetracks disappeared, Aqueduct remained. During the 1980s, it was still promoting itself with a heady series of TV commercials including one with Jerry Orbach, reflecting a time when horse racing was still marketed as quintessential New York entertainment. It survived the city’s fiscal crises. It survived the decline of racing’s mainstream popularity, hastened by changing leisu