The End of the Aqueduct Racetrack
“Girls have luck,” Joey Monaco, a devoted bettor, said. Girls—women, he clarified, particularly those who aren’t gamblers—have luck. We were sitting at Silks, a bar on the ground floor of the Aqueduct Racetrack, in southern Queens, a windowless little hole-in-the-wall anchoring a building that resembles a baseball stadium disintegrating into a bus depot. Monaco is a compact guy who briefly made a run as a jockey before going on to work as a doorman for BlackRock; he recently retired, and now lives close to the racetrack. He described how amateur bettors might take a shine to a young horse with an appealing name and win big against the odds. Start betting regularly, and it’s a different story. “I haven’t gone to a cash machine in, like, thirty years,” Joe Mazzola, another Aqueduct regular, said. He used to empty his bank account at the track; now he holds himself to a strict limit of a hundred dollars a day. “It’s hard enough to win when you’re in a good mood,” he warned. But once you’re “on tilt” it’s nearly impossible. “When you’re on tilt with anything, you’re dead.”
This much I knew already. Aside from the odd football pool, I don’t gamble that often, and I basically always lose, but a friend of mine has the kind of luck that can ruin your life—winning easily and often until, suddenly, he hits a wall. He’s cognizant enough of this tendency that he once left five hundred bucks in the drop ceiling of a men’s bathroom in the Chicago Amtrak station, on his way to Las Vegas, knowing he was likely to empty his bank account and need cash reserves on the way back home. When I describe his luck to people, I tell them this story, and another about the time he got lost hiking in the Poconos and was nearly attacked by a bear. Headlights appeared just as the bear began to charge. My friend ran for the approaching car, yelling for them to stop, but the driver only rolled down the window briefly before speeding away. “Be careful,” they said. “There’s a bear out there.” Such is the fate of the seasoned gambler: luck might keep you alive, but there’s still a bear out there.
Wedged next to J.F.K. airport, in South Ozone Park, where it has been lightly mocked by its competitors for decades, the Aqueduct is a loser’s track: grimy, poorly lit, and devoid of affectation. It’s known as “the hard-core, cigar-smoking, race-tracker type of place,” Jon Stettin, who runs the handicapping-and-racing-news site Past the Wire, told me. Katherine Mooney, a professor at Florida State University and a racing historian, was more direct: “It’s famously awful.”
The beer is cheap, admission is free, and the track is easily accessible by subway, attracting a broad swath of devoted gamblers across the five boroughs. When I visited, earlier this summer, there weren’t very many girls. It was mostly men: men wearing Megadeth hats, old polos, and shirts that read “It’s only a problem if you’re losing”; men hunched over racing papers; men craning their necks to yell at the simulcast races at tracks across the country.
One woman present, Rachel Roesch, told me that her uncle had started bringing her to the track about five years ago. She’d brought two friends in turn, named Jessica and Kat. The Aqueduct was a nice place to hang out, they explained, adding that you can bring your own food. (“It’s like going to the beach,” Kat said.) The place was so cavernous that small neighborhoods had developed within it: regulars at Silks and the upstairs bar, Longshots, would stake out designated seats; out in the stands, there were divisions between the attendees who came equipped with picnic baskets and those who blasted music through clouds of smoke. The most devoted patrons had lucky chairs, lucky mutuel clerks, and lucky televisions.
“All horse players die broke,” the journalist Damon Runyon once observed. This isn’t strictly true. The odds are bad, without a doubt: the track takes roughly twenty per cent of your winnings, and if you bet largely on favorites you’d have to win more than fifty per cent of the time to make a profit. But real money can be made on the backs of losing horses. A skilled handicapper—someone who analyzes and predicts the advantages and disadvantages of individual races—can gauge which horses run better on soft tracks, which ones struggle in the rain, which favored contenders will fall short. It’s a highly technical skill, undergirded by so many bizarre, mystical qualities that it feels almost like dowsing. Race-trackers develop a parasocial relationship with certain horses that rivals the obsession over contemporary celebrity culture. “They’re all good,” Mike Chandler, the bartender at Silks said, of his clientele. “You get the whites, you get the Blacks, you get the Indians, you get the Koreans, you get the Mob,” he continued. “Everyone’s cool. It’s gonna be a shame when it goes away.”
In December, it was announced that the Aqueduct would close on June 28th, bringing its hundred-and-thirty-two-year history of hosting live horse races and emptying wallets to an end. The closure is part of a deal with New York State to consolidate racing at nearby Belmont Park, which has been weatherized to operate in the winter, and redesigned with a higher-end clientele in mind. In order to effectuate that change, the New York Racing Association (NYRA) was granted a four-hundred-and-fifty-five-million-dollar loan by that state that had been proposed by Governor Kathy Hochul—one of many state subsidies that has helped prop up the sport, amid dwindling attendance, for years. The pattern isn’t unique to New York: the horse-racing industry is contracting rapidly nationwide, with more than forty tracks closing since 2000, most of which haven’t been replaced. What tracks remain face an aging fan base and empty stands. Although NYRA officials do their best to paint a rosy picture, even diehards fear the condition is terminal.
“This is what I’m trying to explain to everybody,” said Skip Bedsole, a retired union electrician who is so frequently parked at Silks that he’s appeared in multiple articles about the Aqueduct’s closure. “You’re making this new Belmont Park—for who?”
In the mid-twentieth century, “horse racing, principally thoroughbred racing, was the most popular sport in the country, certainly in terms of attendance,” Bennett Liebman, a racing historian and the former executive director of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School, told me. This was, in part, because horse racing was the only legal game in town for bettors. But that monopoly broke in the late nineteen-seventies, with the rise of off-track betting and the spread of casinos outside of Nevada, and the sport has been in decline ever since.
Fewer people are attending live races, and fewer people are betting on horses. Bettors in the U.S. placed a record $166.94 billion on sports in 2025, according to the American Gaming Association. However, data from Equibase indicated that just eleven billion of that was on horse racing. A few tracks—such as Churchill Downs, in Kentucky, or Del Mar, in California—are still profitable, but the vast majority are heavily state subsidized (with New York and Pennsylvania providing the largest sums). The sport is broadly kept afloat by other forms of gaming, in the form of a profit-sharing agreement between the tracks and the casinos that are frequently attached to them.
Talk to NYRA officials and they’ll say that this is nothing to be concerned about. In their telling, the challenges facing the racing industry are simply a chance for the sport to evolve. “I’d love to have a monopoly on gambling, like racing might have had sixty years ago,” David O’Rourke, the president and C.E.O. of NYRA, told me. “The reality is it’s a kaleidoscope of products now. You have to become more dynamic.” O’Rourke told me that ticket sales for the revamped Belmont Park “are like nothing we’ve ever seen downstate in terms of numbers.” He argued that profit-sharing agreements with casinos are only natural, given that the casinos have attached themselves to the racetracks as a condition of their existence. Direct subsidies to the racing industry, he said, do double duty by also supporting New York’s agricultural sector, of which horse racing is the second-largest commodity, after dairy.
“They’ve been getting away with this for over two decades,” Patrick Battuello, of the advocacy group Horseracing Wrongs, said, anticipating O’Rourke’s comments. (Battuello founded the group in 2013 to push for the sport’s abolition.) “Saying that so many thousands of jobs are tied to the industry, and then they count all these ancillary industries as affected by horse racing. Most of the time the studies are commissioned by the industry itself, and often they’re just plucking numbers out of thin air.”
Pennsylvania offers the starkest version of Battuello’s argument, where the state has funnelled more than three billion dollars in subsidies to the horse-racing industry, a decision that has become increasingly controversial as funding to education and other programs has been cut and diminished by inflation. The Race Horse Development Fund is consistently the largest or second largest economic development expenditure in the state, although advocacy groups across the country have called for an end to the subsidies, and the former Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf repeatedly tried to redirect funding, to no avail. “It’s like a giant party on the Titanic,” Sharon Ward, a policy expert who used to work for Wolf, told Defector in 2020. “Except the guests know what is coming.” Ward authored a report for Education Voters of Pennsylvania, detailing an industry rife with entrenched conflicts of interest that serves to benefit a small, wealthy group of horsemen. “Horseracing generates less than 10,000 direct jobs,” Ward wrote, “while the tourism industry generates 310,000 direct jobs and receives a fraction of the state taxpayer support.”
Frustration ran especially high in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh last summer, as Harrisburg failed to provide funding for public transit. “Transit is facing, like, a $1.6-billion structural deficit across the entire state,” Alexander Milone, a transit committee co-chair at the urbanist advocacy organization 5th Square, said. “We’re sending two hundred million dollars a year to prop up an industry that, by its own numbers, doesn’t generate revenue back. It doesn’t pay for itself—that money is gone. It’s not even, like, ‘Oh, we’re propping up an industry that everyone loves, and tons of people go, and it’s providing social entertainment for the millions.’ By their own numbers, nobody’s going to these things.”
New York has its own version of this battle. “When they have to pay back the enormous loan that we gave them—let’s see if that happens,” said the New York State Assembly member Linda Rosenthal, who’s sponsoring bills to end the subsidies as well as tax exemptions for the purchase of racehorses. “Somehow we always seem to just take care of them when they’re in trouble.”
Even prominent tracks such as Santa Anita Park, in California, and Gulfstream Park, in Florida, are struggling. Last year, a source told the Los Angeles Times, the owner of both tracks hired a consultant to look into a possible sale. Racing has already collapsed in Northern California, and a sale at Santa Anita would reverberate across the sport. “Racing is a four-legged stool,” the Times cautioned. Kentucky is one leg; New York, Florida, and California are the others. “If racing becomes a three-legged stool, the chances of collapse are major.”
The racing industry’s solutions have tended only to make things worse. More than a decade ago, Dennis Drazin, the operator of Monmouth Park, in New Jersey—fretful over his racetrack’s failing revenues and the then governor Chris Christie’s threats to shutter it—waged a campaign to overturn the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, a 1992 law that restricted legal sports betting to just four states. Its dismantlement, Drazin believed, would allow Monmouth to offer a Vegas-like experience in New Jersey. With the help of state lawmakers and the Christie administration, Drazin pushed his sports-betting case all the way to the Supreme Court, where, in 2018, the Justices ruled in his favor, arguing that the matter should be left up to the states. But, in pursuing the case, Monmouth inadvertently unleashed the monster that would overtake it: DraftKings and FanDuel. Problem gambling surged, but racetrack revenue continued to stagnate. FanDuel TV will begin phasing out racing coverage this summer, which horse-racing critics and fans alike see as another step toward oblivion.
“Horse racing walked so DraftKings could run,” Anthony Sciotto, Jr., who used to work in the financial offices at the Aqueduct, told me. “I hate saying this—and I’m going to sound hypocritical, because I think one of the greatest problems [the racing industry] is seeing with eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old men is sports betting—but, if horse racing wants to survive, that’s who they have to target.”
“I really do believe this is a house of cards,” Battuello, the anti-horse-racing advocate, said.
I’ve always loved the Aqueduct, even though there’s no excuse. Racing is brutal, killing eight hundred and fifty horses a year in the United States alone, according to Horseracing Wrongs. When private training facilities are included, the group estimates that the annual death toll could reach eighteen hundred. Thoroughbreds generally start racing around the age of two, and many end up in slaughterhouses three or four years later, before their skeletal systems have even fully developed. There is no real way to defend the sport, besides the fact that horses look so beautiful when they run, and that the Aqueduct is a wonderful place to smoke, and the company always interesting.
The Aqueduct, which opened in 1894, was once a critical stop on the way to the Kentucky Derby. Secretariat both got his start and was retired there in 1973, back when the track attracted crowds of up to fifty thousand people on weekends. But, gradually, as the industry’s center shifted to other tracks and public opinion began to turn against the sport, attendance dropped. The Aqueduct became a relic, popular among locals—particularly the West Indian community—and as a gathering space outside of racing. In 1995, it hosted Pope John Paul II for a historic outdoor mass, and in 2012, after many surrounding communities were all but wiped off the map by Hurricane Sandy, its vast parking lot became a mobile kitchen and relief area. More recently, the space was floated as a potential migrant shelter. The building is run-down: peeling paint and wallpaper frame green vinyl armchairs in the women’s bathrooms and a strong smell of mildew pervades the third-floor grandstand, where the ceiling tiles are falling in. In the empty third-floor lobby hangs an old portrait of the Twin Towers.
There is nothing that New York City loves more than a dump on its way out, though, and on closing day the Aqueduct was packed. When I arrived, just before 11 A.M., there was a line of people snaking around the building, eager to get in while employees were still giving out free vials of track dirt. “Normally, it’s a ghost town,” a woman named Lois Daly Stafford said. She was holding a pillow with a picture of her late boyfriend printed on it. Stafford grew up in Elmont, home to Belmont Racetrack, and worked there during college, in the summertime. It was at the track that she met Jose Rodriguez, an apprentice jockey, whom she went on to date in college, and then again, forty-five years later, after her divorce. The two were still together when he died, last year. Rodriguez won his first race at the Aqueduct, hence the pillow. When I tell her that he’s a handsome guy, she nods. “A real Romeo,” she said.
Like many others on closing day, I was sad to see the Aqueduct go, although after several months of trips to the track, its grimmer underbelly had been showing. The labor conditions of the employees who work in the stables, many of whom are immigrants, are often atrocious, and they’ve been victims of wage theft. Jockeys don’t fare all that much better, as freelancers in a job with alarmingly high injury rates. A favorite jockey at the Aqueduct, Kendrick Carmouche, told me that even riders with thousands of wins get no health insurance or retirement benefits, and, when they’re injured, they tend to get very little disability pay. On the track’s final day, I learned that two horses had suffered injuries and been euthanized in the last week alone. The spectators seemed mostly blind to this: “It’s got Coney Island vibes,” one person, who was visiting the Aqueduct for the first time, told me. The horses “are athletes—they love to run,” a woman told me. (She said that she was all for horse-welfare advocacy, but that, citing a horse trainer, “they fall out of their mothers wanting to beat you.”) Upstairs in the second-floor stands I ran into Joe Mazzola, engulfed in a cloud of smoke and grinning. “Can’t go on tilt,” he told me again. “Then they got you.”
Despite the high spirits in the track’s last hours, it was hard not to wish for something more dramatic, some final escape for the horses and track patrons which would take them beyond Aqueduct and Belmont, beyond the fake pastoral of gambling. The best race I saw—the feeling that I suppose people chase at races—was about a week before the track shut down, and it wasn’t really a race. The favored horse, Luckbeourlady, broke loose at the gate. Standing by the rail, I saw her shoot past at close range with an outrider trailing behind her. She was so fast, it seemed like a hallucination—a horse that could never be caught. ♦
