Traces of handwriting appeared on the wall, and not for the first time, December 12, 2019. The New York Racing Association (NYRA) announced, with a self-serving press release—is there another kind? —that commencing with the coming calendar year, all training and stabling of horses at the Aqueduct Racetrack would cease. Racing was set to continue, for the time being, murmured the well-informed, but barn operations and, critically, morning workouts, would shift to Belmont Park. For those clear-eyed enough to see it, and their number was legion (for horseplayers are a sharp class of people) Aqueduct, The Big A, was doomed.

NYRA is a non-profit corporation that operates the state’s major thoroughbred racing venues, which includes the Saratoga Racecourse along with the other two, but the facilities and the land they occupy is owned by New York State. With Belmont a drive of less than 20 minutes away and the declining nature of the sport, not to mention the thoroughbred racing industry as whole, no earthly reason remained to maintain both facilities.

And given that the track, the adjacent casino, the former stabling areas and the parking lots occupy well over two hundred delicious acres, the site is ripe for redevelopment. We’ll come to know which kind, or some of us will; this is New York we’re talking about, and I don’t expect to live to see it. But no argument supported keeping the place open. Since nothing in this world matters as much as money does, the hardest-bitten handicapper or even those of a dewy-eyed sentimental bent had to admit the decision made financial sense.

The original Aqueduct Racetrack occupied 23 leased acres of farmland and opened in 1894. A bare-bones affair that wasn’t much more than an idea for a racetrack, crops grew in its infield, and fans stood on planks to keep from sinking in the mud.  But the following year, tugboat captain William Carter put up the biggest chunk of purse money for what became the Carter Handicap, and Aqueduct, named for its proximity to a conduit of an old waterworks—which edged out competing tracks in nearby Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay.  The venue grew in popularity and prestige. By 1919, the great Man O’ War was romping over stakes competition at the track, and in 1937, Seabiscuit won the Brooklyn Handicap, to name but two of the champions who graced the Aqueduct oval.

After a renovation that consumed the better part of four years and at a cost of some $33 million, the “new” Aqueduct opened on September 14, 1959. The Transit Authority dispatched a caravan of trains out to the track from Times Square and downtown Brooklyn, at a premium fare of 50 cents, and for those in less of a rush to blow their bankroll, a regular old ride on the A train would set them back a nickel and one thin dime.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller speechified, and Gay Talese, covering sports for the Times near the beginning of his luminous career, filed his impressions of the ever-hopeful railbirds. One surly punter ordered him to buzz off.  The man, Talese noted, “had lost the 5th.”

Amenities were added over the years—a full-service restaurant, a bar, a deli—but the least gracious rethink of the Big A occurred in 2011, with the opening of the Resorts World casino. Half of the grandstand was sacrificed to the renovation, and in its place sprang up a multi-tiered gambling house that featured, for the most part, next wave slot machines (buttons to push in place of handles to pull) that bleeped and buzzed and gave forth whirring emanations. Bowing to reality and a devolving taste in games of chance, NYRA, and most other operators around the nation with likewise collaborations, shared in the revenue the machines threw off.

If there was a honeymoon period, it was brief. By 2014, Mike Repole, billionaire businessman and racehorse owner, was bitching to the Daily News that if you brought a friend to Saratoga, you made a racing fan out of him. If you brought him to Aqueduct, you made an enemy. The same dull refrain was echoed long before (and since) by fans and industry types alike, and NYRA itself seemed embarrassed by this poor relation, this shirttail cousin, treated like an afterthought they couldn’t wait to throw out of the house. Some wondered what took them so long.

No women teetered on stiletto heels. Silly hats were nowhere evident. Weekday drunks, pot smokers, and trash pickers created a tense mix with gamblers suffering through a day of reversals. No glowing “experts” pontificated over favorites on national TV. Fact: At a certain level, nobody is any better at this than anybody else. The sharpest horseplayer will get wiped out on any given afternoon.

Was the crowd rough? Yes. Yes, it was. The low spark of threat, born of frustration, of grievance and loss, was ever-present.  One leaden Saturday I came across a guy who made a big score in the casino next door. He crowed about it, and rightly so. The number fifty-six hundred comes to mind. I suggested he might want to keep his voice down. Big ears were listening.

“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “I got something for ‘em right here,” and pulling up his pant leg, showed me the snub-nosed .38 strapped to his ankle.

In a weirdly prescient article I received the grace to publish some thirty years ago, I made references to decline, dereliction and demise. I led with a description of Queens as the Borough of Cemeteries. You see, Aqueduct was dying then, too. But these were the first words I ever wrote about horse racing, and if for no reason other than that, the place holds a spot forever in my heart.

The Big A will remain open for simulcasting through this summer’s Saratoga meet which ends on Labor Day, operating like an OTB with a pituitary problem. But live racing met its end on Sunday, June 28. Bittersweet maybe, but more anti-climax than anything else, the card was mediocre, the races less than that. A silly hat did make its way into our row, and although the place was mobbed, the lines at the betting windows were short. Picknickers, sightseers, 20-something year-olds snapped pictures with iPhones, nostalgic perhaps, for a past they could not possibly have known.

It would’ve been impossible to keep the grizzled veterans away, of course, and they did appear, grumpy as ever, only today they were wearing dressier shirts. As for myself, I’d like to report that I brought down the curtain on a winning day, but it was not to be. My big long shot, Juliet On Approach, ran as they say, to her odds of 38 to 1 and made no impact at all. I had the winner in the 6th, but I needed Senegal to convert a winning exacta, and he was pulled up in the stretch, eased, and jogged across the finish line dead last. And by then, I’m afraid, it was time to go home.