Aqueduct hosts Wood Memorial Saturday but its days of horse racing are numbered

Aqueduct is the only racetrack in New York City — two concentric turf ovals and nine furlongs of well-kept dirt in South Ozone Park bounded by the Belt Parkway and Rockaway Boulevard. In its heyday, it held 80,000 horseplayers.

On Saturday, the track will host its biggest race of the year, the Wood Memorial, and in fall 2026 it is expected to close, having given the fans, owners and trainers of the New York City metropolitan area 67 years of action. That comes to 132 if you count the years when the track existed in humbler form before the 1959 rebuild, which cost $362 million in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Fusaichi Pegasus won the Wood here and went on to take the Kentucky Derby. Assault and Count Fleet won the Wood before taking Triple Crowns. Secretariat lost it before winning the Triple Crown. That 1959 track reopening was stuffed with Vanderbilts and Guggenheims and Whitneys. Newspaper writers strained for superlatives to capture the muchness of the place: "built for the future," "Dream Emporium" and the one that stuck, "The Big A."

But the coming closure is unlikely to give rise to wailing at the volume that accompanied, say, Yankee Stadium’s demolition. For one thing, downstate thoroughbred racing will not end, only consolidate six miles east at a much snazzier, newly rebuilt Belmont. For another, fans have not attended the Big A in crowds close to capacity for a long time and their ambivalence about the place gets in the way of nostalgia.

"Aqueduct was always very cold," said Massapequa-based Jason Provenzano, owner of vitamin company Makers Nutrition and Flying P Stable. "Even as a kid, my father was like, ‘I’m going to the track,’ if I knew we were running there, I’d pass ... You walk in and it’s cold. The cold just seems to follow you." He likened the place to a "concrete jungle."

Linda Rice, the Floral Park trainer who hopes to add to her horses' more than $111 million purse earnings Saturday with a Wood run by Sand Devil, said Aqueduct’s winter racing had for many decades been "meat and potatoes for the majority of New York trainers ... trainers can make most of their annual income during Aqueduct’s winter meets and may struggle with the tough competition we face during the summer" at other tracks. Will she miss it? "I won’t miss the drive because traffic has been brutal, but I will miss it," she said.

Last year’s Wood drew 7,000 people. From 1959 through the 1970s, said Bennett Liebman, former deputy secretary to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for gaming and racing, Aqueduct was one of or perhaps the top track in the country, dependably drawing 30,000 or more fans six days a week. "If you wanted to bet and you’re not in Nevada, you had to bet horse racing," he said. "There was no lottery, no casinos. They expanded gambling opportunities and horse racing, for the most part, has been unable to compete."

Competition includes college and professional football, which have sucked up some of the interest of sports fans, and new kinds of sports betting available by computer and smartphone. An economist at a 2022 Jockey Club meeting warned an audience that horse racing, formerly the number one sport in America, had fallen to 13th. "Its audience is going to different things," she said, adding that the amount of money bet on horses, often taken as a proxy for interest in the sport, had declined.

It is still, however, a billion-dollar industry, one that advocates say has been reinvigorated by off-site betting, television coverage and new investment. New York Racing Association, the not-for-profit corporation that runs thoroughbred racing at Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga tracks, is using a $455 million New York State loan to rebuild Belmont. 

NYRA is part way through a deal with Fox Sports that will air about 1,000 hours of racing yearly through 2030. A typical race day might bring NYRA action to 50,000 viewers and a big race day might reach an audience orders of magnitudes larger, said NYRA CEO David O’Rourke. NYRA’s yearly handle has hovered close to or over $2 billion since 2010 yearly handle.

"I have good memories at Aqueduct, but it’s time for the state to move forward," he said, adapting a formula he said has worked at Saratoga and Keeneland in Kentucky: "more nature meets metro meets art meets sports."

O’Rourke envisions a Belmont that will look almost nothing like Aqueduct, with luxury suites and family-friendly activities like ice skating and car shows. NYRA projects up to 5,000 daily visitors for Belmont, twice as many on weekends.

At the Big A on a gray Thursday afternoon this week, perhaps 100 people stood on the apron and in the stands when Malu turned in a crisp 1:50 finish to take the first race of the day. The cavernous interior was mostly empty. Resorts World Casino, which opened in 2011 in what used to be horse racing grandstand, looked busier.

Dave Grening, a Daily Racing Form reporter from Merrick who spends many of his workdays alone in the Aqueduct press box, one of few reporters still covering the sport full time, said the state’s loan for Belmont amounted to "a show of confidence and backing of an industry that provides a lot of jobs that people don’t necessarily think about: grooms, hotwalkers, exercise riders."

He said he would be sorry to see Aqueduct go, like many other tracks where he once worked. "But as important as it’s been in the history of this sport, it has probably outlasted its usefulness, and if done correctly, a refurbished, fresh Belmont Park could be all you need in downstate New York."

Frank Trotta, 85, a retired city maintenance worker from Howard Beach, said he’d been coming there for more than 60 years. In the beginning, "I had a lot of friends" at the track, but "people die, people move," he said. Nearby Mike Bella, 82, a retired school bus driver from Bensonhurst, said Aqueduct had given him some thrills. He’d won $1,500 on a single bet and seen Secretariat before he won the Triple Crown. "He was a good horse all along, a big red chestnut," Bella said.

Steve Haskin, a National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame writer now with Secretariat.com, said Aqueduct’s deterioration accelerated after Resort World’s electronic gaming tables opened at the track. "People would rather sit mindlessly at a slot machine" than handicapping horses, he said.

Even horseplayers who play from home will miss experiences that helped him fall in love with the sport, he said. He talked about buses back to Brooklyn’s Flatlands after the races "reeking in cigar smoke, everybody cursing the jockeys who gave them a bad ride."

They will miss too the opening day of Aqueduct’s spring meet. "The excitement in the air was magnificent, the excitement of having racing back, the vibrant colors of the jockey silks. It was like a holiday."

Real estate developer Michael Dubb, a horse owner and NYRA board member, said he’d first visited Aqueduct in the 1970s after mowing lawns for the inventor of the Kel‐Co Class Calculator, a handicapping device. "The track was beautiful and it was quite the place — huge, huge crowds on weekends, even on weekdays. It was kind of overwhelming."

But it was time to move, he said. "The facility at Belmont will be, arguably, the best racing facility in the world. People will go to the track if it’s the right venue. They will get off their couches and go out there."

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly described when Mike Bella saw Secretariat at Aqueduct, and the last name of David Grening was misspelled.