Henry Miller stood on the trackside apron of the new Belmont Park on Friday trying to decide what he thought of the place. I don’t think it’s as friendly as the old Belmont.” He missed the familiar trees and the ivy-covered brick facades. He missed the old bar and grandstand.
Most of all, he was still mourning Aqueduct, the ramshackle Queens racetrack that shuttered in June as part of the $555m experiment that has made the reimagined Belmont possible. For the first time in more than three years, horses were racing at Belmont Park on Friday. But almost everything else about the 121-year-old race course just outside New York city limits had changed.
The cavernous grandstand that once loomed over the home straight is gone, replaced by a smaller, glass-fronted building designed for a sport that no longer expects tens of thousands of people to turn up on an ordinary afternoon. The old Belmont had a footprint of roughly 1.25m sq ft; its five-storey replacement is less than a quarter of the size, at about 300,000 sq ft. Even Big Sandy, the famously deep mile-and-a-half dirt track that became synonymous with the grueling final leg of US horse racing’s Triple Crown, has been relegated to the past, recreated with the same soil composition used at Saratoga with the finish line repositioned for a longer stretch run.
There are four rebuilt racing surfaces in all, a paddock 50% larger than its predecessor and roughly 20 acres of newly accessible green space. Inside, the aesthetic is almost aggressively modern: bright white walls, gleaming floors and long, clean expanses that feel more THX 1138 than old-school racetrack. As one Fox Sports production assistant could be overheard describing it: “It looks kind of like an airport, but it’s beautiful.” It is a dramatic break with the Belmont that has stood on this corner of suburban Long Island in some form since 1905, a piece of New York cultural furniture along the Queens-Nassau County line whose hulking structure and sweeping turns were recognizable even to people who never studied a racing form.
Secretariat surged into history by 31 lengths here, generations before American Pharoah ended a 37-year Triple Crown hoodoo. The track appeared on screen everywhere from multiple Woody Allen films to a Frederick Wiseman documentary to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. What opened on Friday was not simply a renovated sports venue, but New York’s half-billion dollar wager that horse racing can shrink its physical footprint, upgrade the experience and find enough new customers to survive a gambling landscape that has largely moved beyond it.
The $455m state loan that financed the reconstruction was accompanied by another $100m from the New York Racing Association, the nonprofit that operates Belmont, Saratoga and, until recently, Aqueduct. The state money is to be repaid from NYRA’s cut of slot-machine revenue from the Resorts World casino, which sits alongside the now-closed Aqueduct property, only nine miles from Belmont. At a ribbon-cutting on Friday morning, New York governor Kathy Hochul called the loan a calculated investment in the future of the industry.
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