Weak start
“When it opened, it was only a six-furlong course,” the longtime trainer remembers. “And the Jockey Club wouldn’t give it any recognition until it was a mile and a half done. It looked like a barracks on stilts, and for a lawn it had a kind of boardwalk affair.”
James E. “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons, the Hall of Fame trainer of two Triple Crown winners and a host of other champions, was part of the crowd of “about 700” present on September 27, 1894, the opening day of Aqueduct, a new race track built on 23 acres that the Queens County Jockey Club had leased from farmer Nicholas Ryder, who had continued to plant crops in the infield during the track’s early years. to dawn. Named for the proximity of the pipe that supplied water to the city’s Ridgewood Reservoir from Hempstead Plain, the founders – Thomas J. Reilly, the son of a horse dealer and local politician; Francis J. Reilly, Bronx deputy fire chief; and Robert A. Tucker, a Brooklyn businessman who met the famous Dwyer brothers as a young man, donated $50,000 to capitalize on the city’s construction boom and add their own race track to the mix. Their former stand had a capacity of about 2,000, those on the lawn in front stood on wooden planks so they didn’t sink into the mud, and the infield was lined with rows of crops that were still being grown.
Competition from the growing number of race tracks in New York, with five others operating at the time, challenged the new circuit, as did the lack of sanctions from The Jockey Club. Because the racing oval was only six furlongs, The Jockey Club did not want to add Aqueduct to its official roster until that surface was a mile or more, so the men behind the track rented more land and rebuilt the track to bring it into line with The Jockey Club’s requirements. Despite the initial challenges, the fledgling track survived and became increasingly important over the next decade, so much so that several members of The Jockey Club, including Philip Dwyer, whose famous stable had won two Kentucky Derbys and five Belmont Stakes, purchased Aqueduct after the death of Thomas Reilly in 1904.
Under Dwyer’s leadership, the Queens County Jockey Club leased more land, rebuilt the grandstand and expanded the racing surface to 10 furlongs, measuring 1,500 feet, one of the longest in the country. Racing thrived in the New York area, even with the growing power of the anti-gambling lobby, but when Governor Charles Evans Hughes signed a series of anti-gambling bills into law, racing in the state came to an end for almost two years. When the sport returned to the Empire State, many of the racetracks in the New York City area did not reopen, but Aqueduct persevered and added several stakes races from the Gravesend calendar, including the Tremont Stakes for 2-year-olds, the Brookyln Handicap and the Brooklyn Derby, later renamed the Dwyer Stakes in honor of the brothers who had been such an essential part of the racing scene in those early years.
Memorable moments
When racing returned to the Ozone Park circuit, Aqueduct became the site of a host of legendary performances, with the betting calendar an essential part of the sporting year. Man o’ War met John P. Grier in the 1920 Dwyer Stakes, and over nine furlongs the two battled tit-for-tat, setting records at each pole. As they approached the final furlong, jockey Clarence Kummer tapped Man o’ War with his whip and eventually the immortal icon flew ahead of his exhausted rival, with a lead of one and a half lengths. It would be Big Red’s toughest test in his 20 career victories.
In 1944, the Carter Handicap, named after William Carter, the tugboat captain who had contributed the purse and trophy for the first running in 1895, had a triple dead heat when Brownie, Bossuet and Wait a Bit touched the wire together, with the famous photo finish image capturing the unlikely result. That same decade, John Cowdin, president of the Queens County Jockey Club, led the renovation of the urban race track, shortening the oval from 10 furlongs to a mile. As the sport continued to expand from coast to coast, New York faced stagnation, leading to a revitalization under the newly formed New York Racing Association. In 1959, the new aqueduct opened to a crowd of 42,473 people, a far cry from the crowd that numbered in the hundreds on the circuit’s opening day almost 65 years earlier.
When Belmont Park underwent its own revitalization from 1963 to 1968, Aqueduct, nicknamed the “Big A,” played host to the Belmont Stakes and the Triple Crown attempts of Northern Dancer and Kauai King – both unsuccessful – as well as a dominant performance by Damascus in the 1967 Belmont. The latter, owned by Edith Woodward Bancroft, daughter of William Woodward, wore the white and red polka dots of Belair Stud, whose champions like Gallant Fox and Omaha were trained by “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons. The ‘Big A’ had been the coach’s home base for much of his seventy-year career.
Stirring Sendoff
In the decades since, Aqueduct has hosted the second edition of the Breeders’ Cup (1985), a Papal Mass (1995), and victories by many of the sport’s most recognizable names, from horses like Kelso, Dr. Fager, Cigar and Seattle Slew; jockeys like Angel Cordero Jr., Steve Cauthen and Jerry Bailey; and trainers Max Hirsch, Hirsch Jacobs and Allen Jerkens. As the economics of racing have evolved over the past two decades, maintaining two racetracks in the New York area has become more difficult, necessitating a new phase and a farewell to the “Big A.”
In 2026, the New York Racing Association will say hello to the newly reconstructed Belmont Park and say goodbye to Aqueduct, ending more than a century of racing at Ozone Park. This moment is a historic passing of the torch that continues New York’s legacy as a home to the best that racing has to offer, while embracing a new vision of racing in the American birthplace of the sport.
#century #motion #evolution #aqueduct