Flatter: We survived 1 Belmont makeover; how about another?

There was a cliffhanger in last week’s column, and I will get to it about 1,200 words from now. Or you will get to it with a wave of your finger.

First, in most anti-parliamentarian manner, there is new business. And new ideas. Like the artist renderings of the new Belmont Park. Which I like. I don’t know if I love them. But I like them.

How dare I, right? New ideas, critical commentary and social media are by design misanthropic.

“To those who have known the charm of the old place, it can never be the same.” That was what I read in New Yorker the other day about Belmont Park. “It will surely be modern, functional and without atmosphere.”

Yes, New Yorker magazine cared enough to cover the facelift of the old track. In 1963. That paragraph was written three generations ago by acclaimed turf writer George Ryall about the first rebuild of Belmont.

We have been down this turnpike before. We say we embrace change, but in reality we are what Howard Beale said we are in the 1976 film “Network.” On his way to being made as hell, he ranted, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”

So it is with the new, new Belmont Park. We want our old, new Belmont Park with its 30,000-seat grandstand that all but one day a year averaged about 29,500 empty seats. We want our backyard that we homesteaded in a land rush exactly 34 days and 13 hours after each Kentucky Derby and then vacated for most of the ensuing 52 weeks. We want our paddock with the 19th century white pine tree and the 20th century statue of Secretariat and the eternal but ever-dwindling phalanx of stentorian bettors who blame their bad handicapping on just-defeated jockeys, often cursing them with Felix Unger’s initials.

To want that, to channel that golden age spanning Kelso and Spectacular Bid, is to crave a time when we also witnessed political assassinations that were senseless while immersed in a war that was needless followed by a period of inflation that felt endless, all served by a government that was unscrupulous.

Racing was our escape. What is wrong with wanting to cling to that? What was wrong with wanting to bet on more than just the track right in front of us? Well, we nourished our escape, and it grew out of control. OTBs became ADWs became CAWs.

Progress used to be seen as a double-edged sword. Nowadays it has more edges than a cheese grater. But that does not mean we should sit still. How did that work out for the ’80s Celtics?

The Medicare crowd, which I am about to join, knows this is not just a rebuilding of Belmont Park. It is a rerebuilding. The oldest of the photos adorning this column includes an image from the 1905 program that was sold during the very first, 18-day season of racing at the new track on Long Island. One of the most thoughtful gifts I ever received came when John Shirreffs, during the throes of the COVID lockdown, sent me a pristine, digital copy of that 136-page keepsake.

Formally it was called the Official Souvenir and Stake Program of the Inaugural Meeting of the Westchester Racing Association. The very first ad in it was a two-pager for Dreamland, the new amusement park that would burn down in 1911. An early reminder nothing lasts forever.

The original clockwise track had a chute near the more recent location of the emerald parking lot. It made the 1 1/2-mile Belmont Stakes a one-turn race. That lasted until the current setup was established in 1923. Oops. Sorry. The setup that is on hold for a 1 1/4-mile detour at Saratoga.

The old paddock full of trees, plural, was set up in 1905 in the spot where we left it last summer. The spectator area went through two incarnations. The original 11,000-seat grandstand that “embodies original up-to-date ideas and designs which are foreign to all such similar structures” and the old field stand for 4,000 patrons up past the eighth pole did not age well. The iron pillars supporting the roof got twisted over time.

Only 58 years after that grandest of openings, the creaky old stands were leveled. It was 1963, the same year the original Penn Station was demolished. Ebbets Field three years earlier and the Polo Grounds a year later came down, too. None made it 60 years. New York public-works despot Robert Moses and his successor acolytes cut a wide, impatient swath.

It was then when New Yorker published that cynical prediction by Ryall about the new Belmont Park that we now know as the old Belmont Park. Our old Belmont Park. There was another prediction in that 1963 story:

“At a cocktail party a day or so before the opening in 1960, John W. Hanes, then chairman of the board of the (New York Racing Association) trustees, said that eventually all the racing on Long Island would be at Aqueduct, and that Belmont would be used for stabling the horses and as a training ground, which is exactly the present setup.”

In the ’60s Aqueduct was the fair-haired child that already underwent its own four-year rebuild. Belmont was the dowdy, white elephant whose future was uncertain. The sacrificial lamb at the time was Jamaica Race Course. It was torn down in 1960 after all the metropolitan tracks and Saratoga were taken over by what would become NYRA.

Times change, sort of. Two-thirds of a century after Hanes made his prediction to Ryall, Aqueduct will become the latter-day Jamaica, eventually shoveled into the racetrack graveyard by an expanded Resorts World Casino. Belmont will become what the Big A was. It was like Hanes had a highball in one hand while taking a prehistoric selfie with the other, forgetting to flip the mirror image.

The alternatives to rebuilding Belmont Park in the 21st century number more than the most severe one. Sure, save the white pine tree. Absolutely. But the whole idea that the joint should cling to some reminder of its long-gone glory days is like obsessing about an old lover while pretending to move on to a new relationship.

Normally, I loathe artists’ renderings of new sports venues. Most of them never get built. Like military contractors in protracted wars and litigious attorneys in corporate squabbles, the only guaranteed winners in the world of proposed stadia are the architectural designers.

The difference here is the ground already has been broken. The bulldozers have been at work for most of the past year. Like it or not, $455 million in government money already has been loaned and budgeted, and it is being spent. Folks in Maryland might pick up a few pointers here.

The images of the new Belmont Park remind me of the two biggest tracks in Europe that went through major makeovers in the past 20 years. I have been to both. Ascot looks a bit much like tacky Soldier Field in Chicago, but functionally it is terrific and airy and roomy and ever friendly to horseplayers and casual fans alike. Conversely, the gilded remake of ParisLongchamp is glitzy but largely impractical, way too small and unwelcoming to the lower 99 percent, architecturally sinister and a horrible place to be on a rainy day.

That is the thing about change. It is risky. Chances are not everyone will like the result. Here is a memo to all who want to chain themselves to the paddock tree or the Secretariat statue or the ivy on the old grandstand. That might have been fine and good when tens of thousands of people poured into Belmont Park every day. Don’t look now, but there are fewer of you. Of us. And not all of us are digging in to resist something new.

Hopefully, there still will be a game to be played at the new, new Belmont when it gets old in the 2080s. Let my grandchildren know, please.

About last week. I wrote how the newly reported death rate among racehorses was not what it appeared to be, especially comparing the new Horseracing and Integrity Safety Authority figures with previous reports provided by The Jockey Club’s equine injury database, which does not account for training breakdowns.

I wrote that “the list of tracks who do not report their fatalities starts with Churchill Downs, Ellis Park, Fair Grounds, Turfway Park, um, I see a pattern here. Oaklawn, Parx Racing, Kentucky Downs, Sunland Park and Turf Paradise are also on that list of dozens of tracks where never is heard such a discouraging word.”

Shannon Luce, a spokesperson for The Jockey Club, responded saying, “This is not true. ... As stated on the webpage, all of the tracks listed report their fatalities to the EID, including the ones you mentioned.” The exceptions I noted were, Luce said, not listed in bold type. “The ones in bold make the information public.”

Mandy Minger, a spokesperson for HISA, sent me a text that said, “All tracks in HISA states are required to report their fatality number to HISA, and they all did, which is reflected in the rate we published this week.”

I also pointed out that the law that ordered HISA commanded the creation and maintenance of “a nationwide database of racehorse safety, performance, health and injury information for the purpose of conducting an epidemiological study.”

Minger said the portal does exist and that “all tracks in HISA states are required to report their fatality numbers to HISA, and the all did, which is reflected in the rate we published this week.”

The next step is HISA’s promised issuance of “an inaugural annual report (this) month that will include a detailed analysis of key metrics for 2023 concerning equine fatalities.”

The key word repeating itself here is report. Technically, Minger and Luce are right, and for that I stand corrected. The main point of the column, though, was that this information be shared with the public. All of it. Unvarnished. Otherwise, these reports are nothing more than the proverbial tree in the forest.

A right-to-know public is standing by.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.