The A train pulled into Aqueduct-North Conduit Avenue for the final time on Sunday carrying thousands of bettors, casual fans and lifelong regulars on a pilgrimage none of them wanted to make. When the doors opened at 1:10 p.m., they stepped onto what had been one of New York City's most democratic gathering places. By day's end, the last thoroughbred racetrack within city limits had closed after 132 years.
Aqueduct opened on September 27, 1894, on former farmland in Queens with little fanfare. Early spectators saw cabbages and potatoes still growing in the infield. The original grandstand held barely 2,000 people. Three men with no horse-racing experience created it, leasing 23 acres of pasture from what had been part of the Brooklyn Water Works. They named the place after an aqueduct carrying water from Long Island to Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Future Hall of Fame trainer James "Sunny Jim" Fitzsimmons, attending the opening at age 20, joked that the track "looked like a shanty on stilts." Spectators near the rail stood on wooden planks to avoid sinking into mud. Over decades, this unlikely venue evolved from what some dismissed as an "outlaw track" into one of sports' most storied locales.
Man O' War raced there. Secretariat made his debut there on Independence Day. Cigar, Seabiscuit, Kelso, Buckpasser, Ruffian, Seattle Slew and Easy Goer all passed through. For five years in the 1960s, Aqueduct hosted the Belmont Stakes while that track underwent reconstruction. The Breeders' Cup ran there in 1985. Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass there in 1995 before 75,000 people. The track appeared in "The Sopranos" and "A Bronx Tale."
Richard Migliore, the track's all-time leading jockey with 2,238 victories across 31 years, grew up eight miles away in Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay. He rode the subway with his father on opening day each spring, arriving when anticipation became almost unbearable. "You'd get off the train, walk up to the track apron, and suddenly there was this beautiful expanse of green and tobacco brown," he recalled. "Then the majesty of the horses, the tradition of it all, the jockeys and the colors they were wearing." By age 10, he knew he wanted to be a jockey.
Unlike Belmont Park or Saratoga, Aqueduct belonged to the outer boroughs. It sat at the A train's last stop before JFK airport, about 12 miles from Times Square. The transit authority once ran special "Daily Double" express trains directly to the races. Admission was inexpensive or free. The trackside apron on any afternoon reflected the city itself: retirees from Ozone Park and East New York, Caribbean immigrants from southeast Queens, lifelong Brooklyn horseplayers, airport workers stopping in after shifts, Wall Street finance guys escaping for an afternoon, and seasoned bettors who knew every trainer and jockey by name. They arrived speaking English, Spanish, Jamaican Patois, Guyanese Creole and a dozen other languages, carrying racing forms and coffee cups. Newcomers eavesdropped on the subway, hoping to catch a profitable tip.
Migliore, now 62, explained what set Aqueduct apart. "There's a grittiness to Aqueduct that you don't get at Belmont, certainly don't get at Saratoga. At Aqueduct, you get the real fans. They're hardcore. They know the game. If you made a mistake, they'd let you know about it. But that's kind of part of New York, right?"
The New York Racing Association is consolidating downstate racing at a newly rebuilt Belmont Park in Elmont on Long Island, scheduled to reopen in September after a $455 million redevelopment. The move reflects economic realities in a sport reshaped by off-track and online wagering. Yet for generations of horseplayers, trainers and racing fans, the closure feels less like business strategy than the loss of a neighborhood institution.
Stanley Wint, a 69-year-old Canarsie resident who emigrated from Jamaica, had visited Aqueduct for more than 30 years. "I'm going to miss this place," he said. "Just the atmosphere and the people, the down-to-earth people. They come. They get upset when their horses lose. They cheer when the horses win. They curse the jockeys, but it's all fun." What would vanish, Wint believed, was not simply another racetrack but the community that had grown around it.
Sunday's final crowd of 6,866 included longtime regulars and first-timers making a last pilgrimage. A four-piece band greeted them at the gates. Retired track announcer Tom Durkin returned to the microphone for one final call. Cori Boudreau, a 72-year-old retired administrator from Gloucester, Massachusetts, drove four hours determined not to repeat a failed visit years earlier when high winds canceled the card. She and her cousin arrived three hours before post time to claim commemorative mason jars of track dirt promised to the first 1,000 people through the gates. Boudreau had watched this story before. She'd seen Suffolk Downs near Boston and Rockingham Park in New Hampshire close.
Aqueduct served purposes beyond racing too. After Superstorm Sandy in 2012, its parking lots became a Red Cross staging area for relief efforts. Parts of the grandstand sheltered displaced New Yorkers from underserved South Brooklyn and Queens communities. Nearly a decade later, much of the facility was transformed into one of New York's largest Covid-19 vaccination centers, administering more than 300,000 doses during the pandemic.
For decades, Aqueduct functioned as one of New York City's last great third spaces: neither home nor work, but an in-between place where people came to gamble, exchange intel, yell at simulcast screens and catch up with familiar faces day after day. It belonged to the same vanishing New York as old lunch counters, corner diners and neighborhood bars, unglamorous institutions that quietly wove themselves into the city's social fabric.
Author James Rodriguez: "The city doesn't need another reason to forget what it lost when racetrack culture crumbled into memory."
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