On the scorching second Friday of June, with Knicks fever raging and the World Cup starting to heat up, I went out to Aqueduct for a journey backward in sports time.
In the mid-20th century, horse racing was extremely popular in New York City. By the 1960s, Aqueduct was the city’s main track, and the action there also played out in the streets of Harlem (via the underground lottery). The storied site is now heading into its last laps. The final races take place on Sunday, June 28.
Aboard the A train from Rockaway Blvd, I heard odd squawking sounds. They were coming from a 50-something white dude who warned fellow passengers that “if you stare at me for ten seconds, see what happens.” I opted not to find out.
Admission to the races is free. Losing bets cover house expenses (and then some). A sputtering escalator brings visitors to the expansive second-floor betting area, which looks like a once-glamorous airport concourse from the 1960s. Almost all of the few hundred racegoers are men, mostly over 50. A good proportion share West Indian heritage.
Not long after arriving, I heard someone shouting in Jamaican patois. Lo and behold, it was that noisy character from the A train, who evidently has a good ear. Let’s call him Crazy Whitey.
Aqueduct’s grandstands provide a whiff of 20th-century New York City. Tobacco smoke fills the air, mainly from cigarettes but also via a few cigars. A bit of weed blends in. It’s like the good old days in the top row seats at Shea Stadium.
Off to the Races
I arrived just as the first race of the day reached the homestretch. “That’s easy money, bro,” an Asian guy exclaimed as “Five Wishes” made his dreams come true. Because Wishes was one of the favorites, it would have required a large bet to really cash in. Such details are not things that strangers discuss.
Some unexpected clouds then circled. In the second race, the heavy favorite—“Kiamba” (from Ireland)—managed not to finish in the top four in a seven-horse contest. Odds-on winner “Opulent Restraint” then produced a similar, rather improbable result, finishing last in the third race.
A chorus of “Fuck you!” and “You fuckin’ stink!” greeted Restraint upon return to the starting area. It was not clear if the bettors were angry at the horse or the jockey.
At the far end of the grandstands, a gaggle of Jamaican fellas softened the mood, cueing up the soothing reggae stylings of Freddie McGregor on their portable sound system. Closer to the action, a disgruntled 60-something guy started pulling on my ear.
Donning a straw hat with a Puerto Rico flag, the Aqueduct regular started rattling off a bunch of betting numbers that I could not easily compute. But his anger about the dubious results in the 2nd and 3rd races was palpable. “They’re stealing the money!” he declared.
Across the way, the reggae crew turned up Alton Ellis’ classic version of “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy.” Somebody must have scored with “Peak Hype,” a lucrative winner in the race in which Opulent Restraint lived up to its name.
Underground Economy
Throughout the 1960s-70s, “the numbers” provided a highly lucrative underground revenue source in Harlem, the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy. In a 1971 account in the New York Times, veteran investigative reporter Fred Cook stated that roughly 100,000 city residents regularly peddled numbers tickets, with a correct three-digit combination yielding a winner.
As City College historian Matthew (“Matty”) Vaz explains in Running the Numbers (2020), Aqueduct played an integral role in the era’s proto-lottery. If the total daily betting intake at the track was $142,549.75, the winning number for the day was 549. “Any New Yorker,” Vaz notes, “could verify this outcome by looking at the right spot in the newspaper,” thus bolstering the game’s legitimacy. A winning $1 numbers ticket paid $600 in the 1960s, which is over $6,000 today. That’s pretty nice coin.
Matty joined me at Aqueduct for races that followed the Restraint debacle. So, too, did a pal now known as the Nordic Flash, who showed up and immediately hit a boxed trifecta, which also returns pretty nice coin. Vaz then shared some insights from his current research on the history of horse racing in New York.
In the 1950s, the center of racing action was actually five miles from Aqueduct, at the Jamaica Race Course (now Rochdale Village). But the New York Racing Association, a banker-driven entity, decided to make Aqueduct its grand new site. In September 1959, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller attended the launch of the state-of-the-art facility.
Aqueduct has now gone to seed, and renovated Belmont Park opens this September as NYRA’s glitzy new jewel. Although it’s only ten miles from Aqueduct, Nassau County seems like a distant planet.
Whether the “world-class sports destination” will welcome Crazy Whitey, the Alton Ellis crew, and Aqueduct’s tobacco addicts seems unlikely. But at the track, the odds are always moving.
Ted Hamm’s Meet Mayor Mamdani is now available from OR Books.
