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Aqueduct Racetrack closed Sunday, June 28, after staging its final live races, ending New York City’s era of horse racing. Known for generations as “The Big A,” the South Ozone Park venue in Queens was the last operating racetrack within city limits.
Fans bid an emotional farewell to the Big A
Trumpeters played “Call to the Post” and “Auld Lang Syne” before the ninth and final race, fittingly named “It Was a Good Run.” Jockey Jaime Rodriguez rode the Kentucky-bred gelding Assume Nothing to victory. “This is where everything started for me, and winning the last race here today on the last day, it’s going to be a memory I’ll never forget,” Rodriguez said.
Longtime fans mourned the closing. Ursula Nupp, a retired librarian and Queens native, cried during the final race. “This is my childhood,” she said in an NBC News article. “It’s just everything. It’s like all the decades just passed in front of me.”
Antoine de Bar, 79, of Westchester County, said the thought of racing ending was hard to accept, even as he smiled through tears. “This is a horrible day,” he said. “Oh my God, I can’t believe that two hours from now, there will be no racing here. Everybody from New York City comes here.” De Bar recalled winning more than $4,000 wagering on the 2018 Breeders’ Cup Classic.
Frank Berhardini, 62, of Staten Island, has visited Aqueduct since he was 7.
“I’ve seen them all: the great jockeys, the great horses, the great trainers,” he said. “So this is a sad, really sad day for me. It’s a heartbreaking thing.”
Belmont Park set to inherit NYC’s racing crown
Joanne Bedard, 70, said she noticed that most devoted fans at Aqueduct were elderly. “People were all bringing their grandfathers here, and half of them were in walkers,” she said. She added that younger fans lack patience, often waiting less than 20 minutes between races because “they’re too busy betting on their phones.”
Aqueduct joins a growing list of shuttered American racetracks. Hollywood Park in Inglewood, California, once a celebrity haven, closed in 2013; SoFi Stadium now stands on the site. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Bay Meadows closed in 2008 and Golden Gate Fields went dark in 2024. Suffolk Downs near Boston and Arlington Park outside Chicago have also shut down.
Aqueduct will stay open for simulcast wagering until Sept. 7 before closing permanently. Belmont Park, freshly renovated and located across the Queens-Nassau County line, will host all fall, winter and spring racing starting Sept. 18.
The fate of Aqueduct’s 100-plus-acre, state-owned site remains uncertain.
Parimutuel betting isn’t going away— it’s moving online
Aqueduct’s closure reflects a broader shift in how bettors engage with horse racing‘s core wagering model: pari-mutuel pools, in which bettors wager against each other rather than a house, with payouts split among winning tickets after a takeout.
As fewer fans visit physical tracks, that same pool-based system has migrated to advance-deposit wagering apps and, increasingly, to pari-mutuel-powered games (PPGs) — casino-style slot and video poker titles whose outcomes are drawn from live horse races rather than random number generators.
Proponents say these products, legal in fewer than 20 states, could offer racing’s pari-mutuel pools new relevance even as venues like Aqueduct disappear.
