Then there was the time authorities almost called the state police. I had been on the verge of trying the door to the grandstand at Green Mountain Race Track, unlikely sited in rural Vermont, but instead saw the notice that the area was under surveillance. After a few more shots of the track, now converted grass and freshly mowed, I retreated to my car. As I started driving away, I saw a pickup truck approach. And as I tried to turn around, the pickup truck blocked my exit.
* * *
This was the most dramatic of my trips to abandoned horse-racing tracks. The day before my trip to Green Mountain, I had stopped at the fairgrounds in Great Barrington, also a track no longer used for racing. There my fear was more mosquitoes and deer ticks, though a racetrack in ruins, as Great Barrington definitely was, has its own warped psychic energy, perhaps because of the failed bets or the horses that battled one another in battle and occasionally died doing so. In Great Barrington, I saw the paddock area, where horses were saddled, as a particular symbol for decay. Paddocks have stalls with numbers corresponding to the number each horse wear for racing. But this paddock had four numbers missing, as if to say those numbers would never race again. Vegetation grew in and around both the grandstand and the tote board, and if you were ever looking for a metaphor for the state of horse racing, particularly in New England, but all over America as well, the abandoned track being reduced to ruin and fauna could hardly be more apt. One truth is that horse racing will survive our lifetime because of the enormous infrastructure that contains it. It’s still a very big business that is active in quite a few states. Another truth is that it’s rapidly diminishing in popularity, especially since the 1960s: football and basketball, not to mention golf and tennis, have supplanted it. Many feel horse racing is cruel to animals; even those who support racing, as I do, have to acknowledge that the sport does not always, perhaps even often does not, take care of its horses or its people. We still remain divided over the morality of gambling, though we can gamble more and more places. In many places and at many times, only older people, mostly men, go to racetracks, and that can make racetracks on smaller race days seem a bit creepy. My obsession with visiting racetrack ruins comes from an overall obsession with tracks—I’ve been to seventy of them, most of them open. But the abandoned tracks are especially compelling. Are they telling me about the past or the future?
* * *
Horse racing used to be the most popular sport in the country at least until the twentieth century, and probably in terms of attendance even later. But its demise had as much to do with our relationship with the horse as it did with the blame game often leveled at racing officials for not keeping up with the times. Horses used to be technology, akin to cars, and horse racing is in fact a precursor to NASCAR. Car tracks often followed abandoned racetracks in the same location. Now we feel about horses as if they were more like pets, and to some people, horses have a type of transcendent quality. That makes racing them fraught with difficulty, because it puts the burden on those involved with horse racing, making them responsible for the horses’ safety when they are deliberately put at risk. This is a Catch-22 that cannot be solved, so often tracks rely on horse racing’s history as a way of making it appealing, by encouraging people to dress up and act as if the class definitions one hundred years ago are still in place. In fact, the only way that seems to make horse racing work as a sport is to rely on history and nostalgia; it’s hard to modernize a sport that relies on a domesticated animal to produce entertainment. Perhaps this is the reason why I seek out abandoned tracks. I am intrigued by the history of horse racing and how that manifests itself in physical space. And when the racing is gone, all that remains is the space. Of the seventy tracks in my visits, four were no longer racing and two only race a few times a year.
* * *
Abandoned racetracks are the perfect example of nature/culture divides. They begin with an animal, domesticated by man; the track is built around the idea of watching these domesticated animals; the track then becomes more elaborate and highly decorated, often with landscaping; the relationship to the domesticated animal changes; the track falls out of favor; untended, the local flora and fauna begin the process of returning the track to a landscape. There are few landscapes that remain unchanged by humans; perhaps there are none if we count the weather as a human-made impact. So abandoned tracks, forged by the relationship between human and animal, display the way nature and culture play out.
***
The five abandoned tracks with which I am most acquainted come out of different experiences. Manor Downs, a primarily quarter-horse track near Austin, Texas, closed in 2010. I went to look at it when I visited Austin, but the track itself was closed, with forbidding signs promising prosecution for trespassing thwarting my desire to walk around and take a look. Manor Downs is where I covered racing for The Austin American-Statesman in the early 1990s. Even in its early days, attendance was scarce, and I was surprised that the track lasted into the 2000s. Then there was Eureka Downs, a small track in Kansas that I visited on my way across the West in 2012. General Manager Rita Osborn gave me a tour of the track, whose structure was still in good shape but whose racing surface had started the inevitable journey to weeds and grass. We navigated the track’s inside structure with the help of flashlight. Some signs promoting races or events still graced the plant; others rested against the wall. Osborn told me there was some hope of reopening the track if the legislature acted to reallow simulcasting, the showing of other races so patrons could gamble. Otherwise, the track would continue its decay. Given the rightward turn of Kansas politics, such action seems unlikely.
* * *
The two tracks I visited in New England, the Great Barrington track and Green Mountain, herald from the relatively recent boom in racing following World War II, before television became a factor in professional sports and before the world transitioned from an industrial economy to a service one. Great Barrington was a part of a county-fair circuit in Massachusetts that was active until relatively recently. Green Mountain, located on the Vermont/Massachusetts border, contains an impossibly grandiose grandstand. Nearby are Williams College and the Clark Museum, but they provide no context for this enormous, modern track. Both tracks fascinate me because they still look like tracks and, with a modicum of effort, look like they could host racing again. At the same time, the decay is obvious; graffiti litters Great Barrington, and inside the grandstand at Green Mountain is some vandalism. But what’s most fascinating to me are the racing surfaces themselves, which have now become grassy instead of dirt, a visual metaphor for the beginnings of a return to nature. What will actually happen to the tracks is likely something more deliberate, as history shows. While racing was never as popular as it was in other parts of the country, the Northeast had many, many racetracks, particular in the late nineteenth century when trotting and pacing, what we now know as harness racing, were the most popular. But those tracks are gone. A racetrack existed near my middle school in Norwalk, Connecticut; an elderly cab driver told me there was racing near where I used to live in Wilton, Connecticut. I confirmed it on Google maps a few days later; the outline of the racetrack is still visible in the housing development that has now replaced it. I—and you—have been to many of those abandoned tracks, now merely nomenclature, supplanted by development. If you have a Race Street or a Driving Park Lane or anything like that near where you live, it’s almost certain there was racing there in some earlier era. (I play bridge with a friend who lives on a street named Trotting Park Lane near my workplace in Lowell, Massachusetts.) Those tracks were obviously more than abandoned; they have been absorbed into new landscapes, with only the street names left as a clue that racing existed. The most recent track I visited was Garden State Park, which closed in 2001. But the track is not completely gone; the entrance gate still remains, as does the parking lot. The name still exists in the mall and housing development that still hosts it, with images of the once active track in the signage. This is the likely future of one track I visited while it was open, Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, and the track that has just closed in Boston, Suffolk Downs, and other tracks that take up real estate that could be used more profitably. When I visited Turfway Park in Kentucky, I walked from my hotel to the track through a series of big box store parking lots, giving me the distinct impression that the track, home to Kentucky Derby prep races, was likely to be converted some time in the near future. There is probably some irony in the fact that commercial development seems more ethically sound than horse racing, that commercialization seems a better choice for land than racing horses.
***
Back to my encounter. I rolled down the window when the man in the white truck stopped, and he did the same. “Hi,” I said overenthusiastically. “Hello,” he said, not unfriendly. “I’m doing a book on racetracks, and I was taking pictures inside.” “That’s fine,” he said. “The people watching you on camera didn’t recognize you or your car, so I was sent to see what you were up to.” “Oh, sorry,” I said. “It was also very early. I had to get dressed in order to see what you were up to.” “Sorry.” “It’s okay. We’ve had to keep an eye on the track because people were stealing from it, especially the copper pipe.” “I understand,” I said. “I was about to try to go in the grandstand, when I saw the video surveillance sign.” He smiled. “Then you would have had a visit from the state police.” “Any chance I could get inside the grandstand now?” I asked. He laughed. “No way,” he said. “Okay, I understand,” I said. He pulled forward, and I drove away, past the solar energy panels that took up a field next to the track and by the cameras watching my every move. I wondered about the people watching me, waiting for the next phase of the track’s life.