Hard to Swallow Closure of Golden Gate Fields

Anyone looking for a dramatic snapshot of the current Thoroughbred racing economy need look no farther than this weekend at tracks bookending the North American continent.

On June 8 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where a room at the downtown Hampton Inn & Suites is going for $749 a night, Saratoga Race Course is offering a Saturday program of 14 races with total purses of $7.08 million. Somewhere in there the Belmont Stakes (G1) can be found, as well as a Metropolitan Handicap (G1), although the star of the show will be Idiomatic , the best racehorse in the land, going forth in the Ogden Phipps Stakes (G1) in search of her seventh straight win.

Then June 9 in Albany, Calif., hard by San Francisco Bay, there will be one last day of racing at Golden Gate Fields before its closure by The Stronach Group, which has owned the track since 2011. The eight-race card will offer purses amounting to barely $100,000 and attended by what is left of a resilient band of patrons who have maintained local loyalty in the face of a disappearing pastime.

So there you have it: the haves and have-nots of a sport clinging to cultural relevancy. On the one hand there thrives an upstate New York track fueling an economic boom in the local community, secure on land safe from development, and operated by a non-profit structure that is pouring nearly half a billion dollars into rebuilding its downstate Belmont Park headquarters. On the other, we have the dying gasp of a Northern California racetrack increasingly cut off physically and politically from its neighbors, owned by a profit-driven private company whose principals awaken each day wondering how much is being lost by not selling the land on which languishes an aging grandstand and decrepit stables.

Golden Gate Fields, in continuous operation since 1946, is the fourth California racetrack to be closed since the summer of 2008. That is when Bay Meadows ended its run of 74 years, followed in December 2013 by Hollywood Park after 75 years of operation. Los Angeles County Fair racing at Fairplex Park pulled the plug the following year, 92 years after the first races were run there.

Upon each of those melancholy occasions, this reporter fell in line with the accepted response, dishing up a traditional fare of nostalgia and regret, quoting the participants and patrons who shared stories laced with the romance of a unique time and place in their lives, now victims of someone’s bottom line.

Not this time. This time the closure of Golden Gate Fields feels different. There is a sense of stark betrayal by its owners, who plead poverty and insist that continuing to operate the track simply does not “pencil out,” as if an accounting line can be drawn through people unlucky enough to be part of the Golden Gate racing community.

By the time Bay Meadows closed, a large portion of the property already had been developed into a business park and condos, and the rest was on the drawing boards. At Hollywood Park, it took more than two years to safely demolish the structures and another four years for SoFi Stadium and the surrounding complex to rise majestically from the debris. Even in racing death, Fairplex Park has served its community with a multi-purpose facility where youth soccer leagues frolic over a perfect pitch on the former the racetrack infield.

As far as anyone can tell, Golden Gate Fields is simply being shuttered. No sale has been announced by The Stronach Group. No plans for development are even suggested. The towering sign overlooking the 580 freeway will go dark, but from the road, the view will go unchanged, except that Golden Gate Fields will become California’s strangest ghost town.

That town will be minimally maintained for the foreseeable future, according to track management. The stables and track will remain available through June 19, while the equine hospital will continue to service the needs of regional racing. Perimeter security will be required to discourage squatters. Water and power must be continued for fire prevention and safety. At some point there will be a public auction of equipment and memorabilia.

Management has produced a handsome video of historical highlights, which will be shown throughout the stands on closing weekend, and it will live as a heartfelt document alongside similar efforts produced by the media departments of Bay Meadows and Hollywood Park. But no amount of reminiscence can pretty such a picture. Summoning the names of Citation, Noor, Bill Shoemaker, Russell Baze, Lost in the Fog, and Jerry Hollendorfer as touchstones of the Golden Gate journey leads only to the reality of its bitter end.

Is there anything good to come of Golden Gate’s closure? The stable area sits inside the city limits of Berkeley, Calif., an increasingly hostile neighbor who might as well buy that piece of land and turn it into another, more accommodating People’s Park. Citizens for the Albany Shoreline and the Sierra Club have long coveted the vast acreage for an expansion of the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park. Commercial development would be difficult, since much of the track property was shaped by landfill—except for that elevated rock upon which sits the grandstand itself.

The rise to the upper clubhouse entrance reveals a view like no other in the racing world, breathtaking in its sweeping vistas of the Oakland, Calif., and San Francisco skylines. Once inside the grandstand, the racing action has been presented with a backdrop of the Albany Hills, and in the distance the famous Sather Tower rises from the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, adorned with a clock on each of its four facades. This was not a factory racetrack.

It is natural to look for parallels in the several California closures, although personal archives have provided very little comfort. The song remains the same.

Upon the closing of Bay Meadows, I wrote this:

“When a racetrack is destroyed, though, more is lost than mere mortar and bricks. Think of it more like losing the family farm.”

And five years later, I wrote this:

“As a building, Hollywood Park is nothing special. But as a place where the culture of Thoroughbred racing could be found, since 1938, Hollywood has been home sweet home, and with the loss and leveling of Hollywood Park, racing’s sense of place takes a terrible hit.”

I will not insult the reader with a Golden Gate variation on those themes. Just know that after 78 uninterrupted years of service as a source of both security and entertainment for its various constituencies, the place deserved to be in better hands, and enjoyed a kinder fate.