Don’t Scare the Horses

At the far edges of Brooklyn and Queens, there’s an outer borough magic that turns quintessentially normal American pastimes—watching baseball, fishing, eating Italian food—into subcultural activities, inspiring both devotion and curiosity. Aqueduct Racetrack is a hub for these forces. From the Aqueduct Station subway exit, the track looks like it could be abandoned. The vast parking lot is mostly empty, and the pavement is cracked by lines of grass. Up ahead, a broad cantilevered roof suspended from trusses narrows to a sharp edge, calling to mind a Swiss Army blade that has sat for years on a forest floor. The salty air blowing off Jamaica Bay has had a noticeable effect on the steel chords and web members; traces of Aqueduct’s signature baby blue peek through a concerning coat of rust.

In another country, a building like this would become the site of underground raves. The reality here is more mundane. Through fall and winter, Aqueduct hosts all the thoroughbred horse racing in New York State. In summer it’s mostly empty.

Horse racing tends to draw its most dedicated fans from the upper and lower classes. Aqueduct leans heavily toward the latter, and apparently that’s always been the case. Opened in 1894, the track ran afoul of the Jockey Club, a governing body that had been formed by a small group of Manhattan stockbrokers and horse owners only a few months earlier. The Jockey Club created a standard rule book and arrogated to itself the power to sanction races, license jockeys, appoint officials, and collect fees—together amounting to the formal subsumption of the horse racing economy. The Brooklyn Citizen covered this power grab in an article that bore the subhead “Why the Dudes Had to Capture the Common Peoples Tracks,” and it sent a reporter to Aqueduct to get hot takes from race fans on the ground. One respondent framed the conflict in revolutionary terms: “The fact is that the sansculottes [sic] had taken possession of pretty much all that was worth having in racing and the aristocrats had to have it back.”

For better or worse, no Ozone Park Robespierre emerged to fight back against the Jockey Club’s Dudes. Within a few years Aqueduct was racing under the organization’s auspices. In its final form, the original track had a long grandstand that curved along the first turn but little indoor space. It was totally rebuilt in the late 1950s under the supervision of Arthur Froehlich, the primary architect of midcentury racetracks from Hollywood to Caracas. Froehlich began his career by propagating the chic curves of the streamline moderne style across LA and its suburbs. By the time he got to Queens, he had fully embraced the right angle. His original facade was sober, coming alive only around the entrance, where point columns augmented with racing standards pierced a wide horizontal awning; the awning’s sharp, downturned edge hung over the entry porch like a guillotine never used. And keeping with the track’s proletarian spirit, Froehlich designed the stands so that the “two-dollar bettor,” the low money, could watch the races from covered balconies—a rare thing at the time.

Today, the views are better than ever, in part because the crowds are smaller. On the ground level, right next to the track, there’s a patio area with some peculiarly spaced benches. (They’re far apart and none are quite parallel.) There’s a lawn with no chairs and, in the lower balcony, a VIP section where the seats are lawn chairs. But because there are hardly any VIPs, and even fewer security guards, these too are available for anybody. A higher, enclosed balcony serves employees of the track and members of the press—though not the architecture press, it would seem, as my own attempts to gain access there went unanswered.

It’s opening day of the fall season, and I didn’t come to the track to sit behind glass, anyway. The sun is out, the weird benches are filling up, and I’ve got a Jamaican beef patty in my hand. The first race of the afternoon is the Lonesome Glory Stakes. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was typical for a crowd of 50,000 to amass at Aqueduct. In 1965, more than 73,000 filled the grandstands to watch a horse called Gun Bow win a race called the Metropolitan Mile. In 1995, about the same number came here to see the Pope. As the horses approach the starting gate, I turn around and count the number of people outside watching the race today. Looks to be about 100.

A bell rings and the horses are off. This race is unusually long—three laps—and there’s a series of hurdles that the horses must leap each time around. Snap Decision, the favorite, jumps to the lead and stays at the front for the first two laps. He’s twenty pounds heavier than the rest of the field, and I assume this has given him an insurmountable advantage over his competition. Not so. He falls back on the final lap, and the race becomes a duel between L’Imperator and Merry Maker. Merry Maker, who had been in last place until the very end, sprints across the finish line and wins by a nose. Snap Decision ends up in fourth.

After the race much of the crowd trickles inside, and the winners cash their tickets at one of the long rows of tellers around which the interior is organized. At least that’s how it worked when I first started going to Aqueduct in early 2012. Now, most bettors win their winnings and lose their losings entirely on their phones. When they come inside, they do so mostly to buy snacks and watch races at other tracks that are broadcast across the many TVs. The booths for the tellers are still there, but they’re almost entirely empty. Like the rust on the roof, they are a sign of a building that has entered hospice, set to receive palliative care until its imminent demise.

Which is a little strange because Aqueduct was last renovated in 2017. Everyone involved must have known the track’s days were numbered. Governor Eliot Spitzer had proposed closing it ten years earlier, and a casino, Resorts World, was added onto the site in 2011. That addition didn’t just eat into the parking lot, it knocked down almost half the stands, leaving the area down by the finish line barren and inaccessible. Resorts World has since expanded its Ozone Park footprint, thanks to a $400 million expansion by the corporate architecture firm Perkins Eastman that tacked on more gaming space and an eight-story hotel.

The future of New York City gambling likely lies in the casino rather than the track. In fact, the casino is already subsidizing the track: In September 2023 alone, its slot machines made a profit of over $55 million, some of which was used to increase the size of the purses over at Aqueduct. New York has three “downstate” casino licenses to award, and it makes sense that Resorts World will get one, which would enable it to move into table games currently prohibited under the law.

Many would date Aqueduct’s decline to the early 1970s, when Off Track Betting parlors opened around the city. Casinos in Atlantic City and Connecticut further cut into its share of the region’s gambling revenue, as did a Froehlich-led redesign of the nicer and larger Belmont Park racetrack six miles away. Both tracks, as well as the Saratoga Race Course, are operated by the New York Racing Association (the other NYRA), a nonprofit corporation founded in 1955 at the behest of the Jockey Club in order to consolidate thoroughbred racing operations throughout the state. When that NYRA finishes a new renovation and winterization of Belmont Park, Aqueduct will officially become redundant, opening new possibilities for its 210-acre site.

It’s hard to argue that a horse track is the best use for a lot this size inside city limits. I’ll still miss it when it’s gone. In a city where even a thing called “air rights” holds remarkable value, there’s something remarkable—even a little delirious—about allocating this much real estate as a hangout spot that requires almost nothing of its visitors. Admission is free, and though the layout is largely unintuitive, it never feels as though the space is guiding you in any one direction. Wandering around—in through the unattended main entrance or down at the benches by the track—I occasionally get the feeling I’m going somewhere I shouldn’t. Then I realize that no one cares.

I take in a few more races from the grandstands, choosing a seat between a middle-aged couple placing bets and a group of men loudly talking shit. Races are run about once every hour, so there’s plenty of downtime. I put it to use by walking over to Resorts World, but the hallway that used to connect it to Aqueduct is now blocked by a metal wall. It feels like I’m in a video game and I haven’t wagered enough money—indeed, I haven’t waged any—to unlock the next level.

I go outside and try to enter the casino through the parking lot, but this entrance has moved, too. The last time I was here, prior to the Perkins-Eastman renovation, the casino facade was a burnt orange, with two blunt spires flanking the entryway. It looked like a Mormon temple built in Santa Fe. The spiky silhouette remains, even as the facade has largely been built over and now sports a shocking surface treatment—a hallucinogenic, downmarket take on Piet Mondrian.

Eventually, I find a glass-walled reception area. To the right is a glass block containing a restaurant. To the left is a much larger glass block containing a hotel. They’re buildings that could be in any city, serving any function. I’m struck by the feeling that the complex is boring on purpose, as if to not scare either the tourists or the horses.

It seems to me that the casino is suffering from a perverse case of learning from Las Vegas. Since the Wynn hotel opened on the Vegas Strip in 2005, the “decorated sheds” that Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour were once so charmed by have fallen completely out of fashion. “Form follows function,” casino mogul Steve Wynn explained to the Las Vegas Business Press in defense of his namesake “duck.” His guests needed floor-to-ceiling windows, and the city’s new investors needed a style that would make international capital feel safe parking its money there.

It’s appropriate that Resorts World Las Vegas, a glass tower so identical to Wynn’s that Wynn sued for trademark infringement, was built on the lot once occupied by the Stardust, the glitzy hotel where Venturi and Scott Brown had their room comped while they worked on their book. To its credit, Resorts World Vegas has gold-red windows that are intensely dramatic for about forty-five minutes during sunset and a pretty good bar co-branded with a company that gives customers reward points for getting plastic surgery. The Queens version has no such charms. It is very much a nonplace and, worse, as a nonplace, it’s not even the hyperreal sort typified by the themed casinos of vintage Vegas. It’s more of an airport, and inside, many of the gamblers look like they’re having about as much fun as if they were waiting for a flight.

I pass through the lobby and enter a maze of slot machines. The casino holds over 6,000 of these, as well as 1,300 “electronic table games” (individualized digital versions of games like blackjack and roulette that are allowed by a loophole in the law) spread across three floors. The layout remains essentially the same as it was prior to renovation, and I walk to the top in search of an excellent dim sum restaurant I ate at once before. I’m told it’s long closed, which means it’s time for me to head back to the Aqueduct side.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. In contrast to Aqueduct, here the floor plan is confusing by design. Gambling areas are kept dark, and the rows of machines repeat and loop back on themselves. In the twelve years since Resorts World opened, a few hundred visitors have been arrested for damaging these machines in frustration. I can’t say I blame them.

Finally, back on the first floor, I’m relieved to see sunlight entering through a far window. It turns out to be a glazed door that opens onto a balcony overlooking an area where part of the grandstands had been in the days before the casino. The Brooklyn Citizen wrote that when the track opened, the stands offered an unobstructed view of the beach. I can’t see that far, but I do see JFK’s control tower rising in the distance. The finish line is directly below me. It’s hard to imagine a better place to watch a race, but this section is totally blocked off from the Aqueduct crowd.

I walk down an exterior staircase and end up only a few feet from the dirt of the track. Were there a photo finish, it’s possible that the back of my head would wind up in the photo. There are no seats or even lawn chairs here, but there’s a concrete block that serves as a perfect bench. As post time nears, more people come out to the balcony, and I begin to hear their voices above me. “Yeah, they’re tearing this shit down!” a woman tells her friends. “Moving it all to Belmont.” Another woman comes down to the pavement. She snuck a can of Coors in her purse. A man is speaking in Yiddish on the phone.

The starting gate crashes open and the favorite, Happy Bob, sprints to the front of the pack. But a 22-1 long shot born in New York, Mama’s Gold, runs alongside him. They turn toward the home- stretch, into my line of vision, and Mama’s Gold opens up a lead of two lengths. It’s the tightest race of the day, and off to my right I can hear the Aqueduct crowd roaring in the stands. The sound of horses grows louder too, and as they come down the homestretch they pass so close that I can feel the beating of hooves as it hits my chest. Another horse, Gut Feeling, running at 2-1, overtakes Mama’s Gold. Mama’s Gold makes a final charge, but it isn’t enough. Gut Feeling wins by a head.

Back on the track side of the complex, bettors high-five or curse the air. All go inside, maybe to try their luck in the casino. The race is over, so now the good part can resume.