Once you learn the shape, you can’t unsee it. A clean oval ghosting beneath cul-de-sacs, stitched into golf fairways, hiding behind warehouse rows. From above, the outline snaps into focus — the long oval where the rail once ran — the street encircling a park, the curved tree line at the edge of an empty field, or even a cemetery laid out in graceful, concentric rings.
When we think of America’s most historic sports, images of baseball diamonds and football fields often come to mind. But the sport of horse racing has a heritage just as rich. For centuries, racetracks were a fixture of communities, bustling with spectators and thundering with the hooves of champion steeds. While some of these iconic venues still draw crowds, countless others have faded from view, leaving behind only ghostly imprints on the landscape.
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Every spring, the sport’s living heartbeat still rumbles across three stages: two breathless minutes in Kentucky, a sharp turn through Baltimore, and the long, unforgiving stretch in New York. The Triple Crown is ritual and roll call — Derby, Preakness, Belmont — our national reminder that speed and nerve can still command a crowd. But the country’s racing story isn’t only told by packed grandstands, it’s also etched into the land and preserved in aerial imagery.
From Fairgrounds to National Shrines
Horse racing has deep roots in America, dating back to colonial times (the first track was built on Long Island in 1665). The bloodlines that defined American speed arrived in flesh and bone: in 1798 the English Derby winner Diomed was imported to Virginia, and the supposedly washed-up stallion sired so prolifically that he’s often called the father of American Thoroughbreds.
By the mid-19th century, racing was no longer just a pastime of Southern planters or city elites. It was spreading westward with the frontier. Illinois, Missouri, Texas, and Louisiana were all staging organized meets by the 1840s, often at county fairgrounds where trotting races were as common as flat Thoroughbred contests.
The Civil War (1861–65) interrupted this growth: racing virtually ceased in war-torn areas, and the famed breeding farms of Virginia and the Carolinas were devastated as Thoroughbred horses were requisitioned for military service. Racing rebounded quickly in the post-war Reconstruction era.
The real watershed came in 1863 with the debut of Saratoga Race Course in upstate New York. For the first time, a purpose-built track outside the big cities became a national destination. Within a decade, other giants followed: Jerome Park in the Bronx hosted the first Belmont Stakes in 1867; Pimlico opened in Baltimore in 1870; and Churchill Downs introduced the Kentucky Derby in 1875. Add to that New Orleans’ rebuilt Fair Grounds and New Jersey’s Monmouth Park, and the foundation of America’s racing calendar was set.
If Saratoga and Kentucky gave racing its prestige, Brooklyn gave it its pulse. By the 1880s, the borough was home to Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, and Gravesend — three tracks that turned Coney Island into racing’s capital. Summer afternoons drew thousands, with big-money stakes that rivaled anything in England. At its peak, Brighton Beach was said to be Brooklyn’s single largest employer.
Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco weren’t far behind, each boasting their own courses. By 1890, there were more than 300 racetracks across the country, from polished metropolitan ovals to makeshift fairground tracks in small towns. Racing was America’s sport of the Gilded Age.
Even in New Orleans, the Metairie Race Course, a grand track known for its distinct oval layout, thrived. However, when the Metairie Jockey Club went bankrupt in 1872, the land was acquired by a rival citizen, Charles Howard, who was once denied membership to the exclusive club. In a fascinating act of historical retribution, the track was transformed into Metairie Cemetery. The layout of the track, including the rail, is still visible in the cemetery’s main avenues, a perfect ghost oval on the landscape.
The Progressive-Era Crackdown
Popularity bred backlash. Reformers in the early 1900s saw the betting rings as symbols of corruption. States moved swiftly: New York outlawed bookmaking in 1908, and by 1911 every track in the state was shuttered. California banned wagering in 1909. Illinois, New Jersey, and others followed.
The result was devastating. From hundreds of active courses, the U.S. shrank to just a couple dozen. Brooklyn’s three proud tracks never reopened. The Belmont Stakes wasn’t even run in 1911 and 1912. Owners shipped horses overseas, and the sport teetered on extinction.
What saved racing was a new way to bet. Kentucky tracks, led by Churchill Downs, introduced the pari-mutuel system in 1908. Instead of shady bookmakers, bets went into a transparent pool, with odds set by the public. Reformers tolerated it, governments could tax it, and racing finally had a lifeline. By 1913, New York cautiously reopened its tracks under stricter rules.
A Roaring Comeback
After World War I, the sport came roaring back. Tracks were no longer the dens of the Gilded Age but orderly, respectable businesses. States desperate for revenue in the Depression leaned into it, and by the 1930s, racing was back in style.
The building boom was dazzling. California stole the spotlight with Santa Anita Park in 1934 — an Art Deco palace at the foot of the San Gabriels — and Del Mar in 1937, “where the turf meets the surf.” On the East Coast, Boston got Suffolk Downs, Rhode Island opened Narragansett Park, and Delaware gained its namesake oval. Kentucky added Keeneland in 1936, built by horsemen who wanted a track devoted to tradition rather than spectacle.
Even in the Midwest, where racing had been nearly erased, new venues rose. Arlington Park near Chicago flourished, Nebraska’s Ak-Sar-Ben opened to full houses, and Garden State Park in New Jersey launched in 1942. By the late 1930s, racing became mainstream entertainment, second only to baseball in the nation’s affections.
Harness Lights and Quarter Miles
While the Thoroughbreds reclaimed the headlines, other forms of racing carved niches of their own. Harness racing, once confined to daytime fairgrounds, exploded after World War II thanks to technology. Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island pioneered night racing under floodlights in the 1940s, and its mobile starting gate kept races smooth and fair.
While Roosevelt was a trailblazer, other tracks hold even deeper roots. Freehold Raceway in New Jersey is the oldest continuously operating racetrack in the United States, with races dating back to the 1830s, while Goshen Historic Track in New York, founded in 1838, is a National Historic Landmark, one of only two sporting venues in the nation to hold that distinction (the other is Churchill Downs).
Quarter Horse racing, long the province of ranch-country match sprints, finally got formal venues in the 1940s. Tucson’s Rillito Park opened in 1943 with a straight chute built for sprinters, soon copied elsewhere. By 1951, California’s Los Alamitos had joined the circuit, laying the foundation for quarter horses as a major branch of the sport.
Across the Midwest, states like Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, and Minnesota all established tracks during the ’30s (for example, Ak-Sar-Ben in Omaha ran its first full meet in 1935 after pari-mutuel wagering was approved in Nebraska). By the end of the decade, racing was once again a nationwide industry – and an important source of tax revenue for many states.
War and Renewal
World War II briefly dimmed the lights again. The federal government suspended racing in 1945 to save fuel; Santa Anita and other West Coast tracks were closed altogether during the war, with Santa Anita even repurposed as an internment center. But the return was swift. That June, the Kentucky Derby resumed, and pent-up demand made the postwar years some of the sport’s most profitable.
Tracks old and new flourished. Monmouth Park reopened in 1946 after half a century of silence. Florida’s Gulfstream Park, opened just before the war, became a winter staple. Attendance records fell year after year, and network radio — and soon television — brought the big races into homes nationwide.
By mid-century, the racing map looked both familiar and transformed. The old shrines — Saratoga, Pimlico, Churchill — remained the anchors. The flashy newcomers — Santa Anita, Del Mar, Keeneland — were firmly established. Harness racing had reinvented itself under the lights, and quarter horse racing was just beginning to scale up from dusty fairgrounds.
Most importantly, the industry had weathered its moral battles. The days of shadowy bookmakers were gone, replaced by regulated pari-mutuel systems that states could monitor and tax. Far from being outlaw sport, racing had become respectable, even essential, to state coffers. America’s racetracks are a testament to a century of shifting tastes, laws, and fortunes. Walk into Saratoga, Keeneland, or Santa Anita today, and you can still feel the echoes of those who built and rebuilt the sport.
The State of the Modern Track
In recent decades, a new economic reality has forced another transformation. Declining attendance pushed many tracks to a crossroads: adapt or vanish. Some found salvation by adding casino gambling, morphing into so‑called “racinos.” Venues like Prairie Meadows in Iowa and Dover Downs in Delaware now use gaming revenue to prop up racing purses and keep the sport alive.
While Pimlico Race Course survived for over a century, a major redevelopment plan is currently underway that will see a new grandstand built on the historic site, ensuring the Preakness Stakes stays in Baltimore while the surrounding land is developed for community use.
For others, the gamble didn’t pay off. Hollywood Park Racetrack in Inglewood, California, once a glittering venue, was demolished to make way for SoFi Stadium. Garden State Park Racetrack in New Jersey, rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1977, ultimately couldn’t survive the pressures of dwindling attendance and development. Bay Meadows Racetrack in California likewise hosted racing for decades before being swallowed by suburban expansion. It’s a stark make‑or‑break choice, proof that the very ground of a racecourse must evolve or be consumed.
Ghost Ovals on the Landscape
In aerial imagery from the 1930s through the 1960s, traces of the nation’s oldest racetracks can still be spotted. Cities grew, suburbs sprawled, and shopping malls replaced grandstands, yet from above the faint oval outlines remain visible — ghost rings that once thundered with hooves and cheers. Many county fairgrounds and shuttered courses across the Midwest and South left behind these dirt tracks, slowly fading into farmland or subdivisions but still etched into the landscape.
These ghostly rings remind us that racing wasn’t just about the great names we remember — it was a part of everyday American life. A place where towns gathered, where fortunes were risked, where entire communities looked for a spark of excitement. They’re also a reminder of how the landscape itself holds memory. Even when the grandstands are torn down and the barns fall quiet, the geometry of the track endures, recorded from the air.
To study these aerial traces is to see history written on the ground. They are the signatures of an age when racing was king, when nearly every state boasted its own oval, and when the rhythms of hoofbeats and wagers left, in one way or another, a permanent mark on the American landscape. How many can you spot in our aerial archives? Take a look and see how many ghost ovals you can find.