Golden Gate Fields timeline: Even before 1941 to 2024

Albany, Calif.

Golden Gate Fields was not the first development on 140 acres nestled against the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay. In the last 200 years it has been a commercial public ranch, a last stop for beef cattle, a dynamite factory that literally exploded into financial oblivion, a mud bed for clamming and a dry dock for part of the U.S. Navy fleet in World War II.

What it will be next remains to be seen. What it will not be anymore is the active racetrack that it has been for most of the past 83 years. The Stronach Group closed it Sunday, 11 months after news broke that it was consolidating its West Coast racing operation at Santa Anita.

The racing history of that parcel of land straddling Albany and Berkeley has been dotted with colorful successes, disappointments and oddities. Highlights are detailed here, gleaned from histories written about the track and contemporaneous reports dating to the Great Depression.

June 27, 1933. Thanks to a 63 percent vote of state voters on proposition 3, horse racing and pari-mutuel betting were legalized in California.

Nov. 27, 1939. Ground was broken on Fleming Point for the building of Golden Gate Fields. With singer Bing Crosby among the board members of the Golden Gate Turf Club, architect Maury Diggs oversaw construction of the $2.5 million track to mirror his design work at nearby Bay Meadows.

Feb. 1, 1941. Postponed more than one month because of a wet winter, what was intended to be a 35-day meet finally began on a rainy day at Golden Gate Fields. Shookumchuck, bred by Crosby and ridden by apprentice jockey Eddie Franklin, won the first race. The meet lasted only five days and was abandoned after the original cushion eroded and the dirt track was washed away.

July 11, 1941. With ongoing trouble with the racing surface and swimming in $500,000 of debt, Golden Gate Fields was declared bankrupt and auctioned off for $1,000. After the U.S. was drawn five months later into World War II, the track property was converted by the military into a naval landing-force equipment depot, where hundreds of ships and submarines were dry-docked in preparation for deployment in the Pacific.

Sept. 9, 1947. For the first time in six years, races were run at Golden Gate Fields. The track reopened under the aegis of the Pacific Turf Club.

Oct. 4, 1947. Fair Truckle went six furlongs in 1:08.4 one race before Count Speed ran 1 1/16 miles in 1:41.0. The two times were world records.

April 20, 1949. Bill Shoemaker, a 19-year-old bug boy, rode Shafter V to a win the day’s second race at Golden Gate Fields. It was the first of 8,833 victories in a Hall of Fame career before Shoe’s retirement in 1990.

June 24, 1950. Deep-closing 5-year-old horse Noor defeated 1948 Triple Crown champion Citation by three lengths in the $57,000 Golden Gate Handicap. Bred in Ireland by the Aga Khan III and campaigned by Seabiscuit’s owner Charles Howard, Noor set a world record with a time of 1:58.2 for the 1 1/4 miles. He defeated Citation four times that year, including one week earlier on the same track in the 1 1/8-mile Forty-Niners Handicap.

June 5, 1954. The Pacific Turf Club began its gradual acquisition of Bay Meadows.

Sept. 29, 1954. Stewards turned down trainer Jimmy Jones’s request to scratch Dixie Lad from the $5,000 Millbrae Handicap. Carrying odds of 14-1, Dixie Lad then won the 1 1/16-mile race.

May 2, 1955. A plot to shoot jockey Johnny Longden was determined by police investigators to have been a hoax. The threat had been phoned in anonymously the previous week to Golden Gate steward George Schilling. Bodyguards provided by the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau were at Longden’s side for days.

Dec. 7, 1957. In his usual, deep-closing style, Silky Sullivan made up 27 lengths to get his first stakes win in the $25,000 Golden Gate Futurity. His jockey Manuel Ycaza, a Panama native who earned his second U.S. stakes victory, told the San Francisco Examiner, “I love him like a son. He is a nice machine.”

Feb. 22, 1962. William Gilmore, who owned Golden Gate Fields and Tanforan Racetrack close by in San Bruno, died at his vacation home near Grass Valley, Calif.

July 31, 1964. After closing the previous fall, Tanforan burned down. Dates for the track that opened in 1899 had been transferred 10 miles south to Bay Meadows.

April 3, 1969. San Francisco native Robyn Smith broke a gender barrier when she became the first woman to ride in a Northern California horse race. Swifty Yorky placed second in the third race of a Thursday card at Golden Gate. Smith later married actor-dancer Fred Astaire.

Feb. 22, 1972. A turf course was opened inside the main track at Golden Gate Fields.

March 5, 1977. What was called a modern-day record 26,109 fans showed up to see riding sensation Steve Cauthen, 16, paired with 8-5 favorite Make Amends in what turned out to be a last-place finish among the 11 horses in the $150,000 California Derby. Despite that, Cauthen and his agent Lenny Goodman enjoyed an unprecedented $6 million year. In 1978 Cauthen would team with Affirmed to become the youngest jockey to win the Triple Crown.

Feb. 7, 1980. Thanks to the new American Tote 300, Golden Gate Fields became the first track to offer customers the option of doing all their business with the same clerk. Before that, betting and cashing were done at separate windows.

May 6, 1984. En route to his second horse-of-the-year award, future Hall of Fame gelding John Henry carried jockey Chris McCarron to a 1 3/8-mile turf-course record of 2:13.0 in winning the Golden Gate Handicap.

Feb. 5, 1990. Ron Hansen, a well-known Northern California jockey, was banned from Golden Gate Fields after he was accused of trying to bribe another rider. The suspension was provoked after racebooks at the Desert Inn and Stardust in Las Vegas reported betting irregularities at Bay Meadows.

March 13, 1990. Saying a bribery claim could not be proven, the CHRB ordered Golden Gate Fields to let Hansen compete again.

April 16, 1992. Russell Baze became the first jockey to ride seven winners on a single card in Northern California when he accomplished the feat at Golden Gate.

Oct. 3, 1993. About 14 hours after riding at Bay Meadows in what turned out to be his final race, Hansen, 33, ran his Jaguar into the back of another car on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. He ran away from the high-speed crash and disappeared.

Jan. 24, 1994. Hansen’s decomposed body was found in a bayside marsh in Hayward, Calif. The Alameda County coroner never could come up with a cause of death. There eventually were reports that Hansen may have been part of a federal investigation into a race-fixing ring and that he might have been the victim of a mob hit. The FBI confirmed to the San Francisco Chronicle that there was an investigation, but it did not provide any details.

March 26, 1997. U.K.-based bookmaking business Ladbroke Racing, a subsidiary of Hilton Group, announced it was buying Golden Gate Fields. Ladbroke had been leasing the track from Catellus Development in the eight years since the Pacific Racing Association ceded management.

Nov. 5, 1999. As part of the liquidation of all its international gaming properties in the Americas and South Africa, Ladbroke announced it would sell Golden Gate Fields to Frank Stronach’s Canada-based Magna International for $77 million. This came nearly a year after Stronach bought Santa Anita.

Jan. 22, 2005. A gate-to-wire ride on Hollow Memories gave Russell Baze his fourth victory of the day and ran his win total to 8,834, one more than longtime North America record holder Bill Shoemaker for what was then second on the career list among jockeys.

Sept. 17, 2006. Lost in the Fog, whose winning debut at Golden Gate in 2004 presaged his sprint championship in 2005, was euthanized after he was diagnosed with cancerous tumors in his spleen. He was buried on the infield of the track where his career began.

Nov. 7, 2007. Golden Gate Fields christened its new Tapeta synthetic surface to replace the dirt track. The change was ordered by the CHRB, which also called for all-weather tracks at Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar.

Feb. 1, 2008. After a five-minute wait to get a verdict on the win photo, Two Step Cat’s was declared the victor in the third race of a Friday card at Golden Gate Fields. That made Russell Baze the first jockey in North America to amass 10,000 victories. He reached the milestone 23 days after world-record holder Jorge Ricardo got there in Argentina.

Aug. 17, 2008. After 74 years, Bay Meadows in San Mateo, Calif., hosted its final day of racing, leaving Golden Gate Fields as the only major racetrack in the Bay Area. Demolition began the following month, but the pile of debris remained until it finally was cleared the next year to make way for a residential and commercial development.

Jan. 12, 2010. Seven weeks before it was scheduled to be sold at a bankruptcy auction, Golden Gate Fields was transferred from Magna Entertainment to MI Developments, both owned by Frank Stronach. It was part of a $75 million reorganization settlement that included Santa Anita, Gulfstream Park, AmTote and Xpressbet in the move.

July 3, 2011. Golden Gate Fields, Santa Anita and Gulfstream Park were transferred formally to The Stronach Group, which does business now under the name 1/ST.

June 12, 2016. Dreamcatcher finished fifth in the eighth race, a $62,500 optional-claiming allowance test covering one mile on the Golden Gate turf. It was the last time together for trainer Jerry Hollendorfer and jockey Russell Baze, who rode two more races that Sunday before retiring. They were far and away the most successful trainer-jockey combination in the track’s history.

April 2, 2020. Shortly after the onset of the COVID pandemic, the public-health department of Alameda County ordered Golden Gate Fields to stop racing. Spectators already had been locked out of the track since March 12. Racing would not resume until May 14.

March 4, 2021. Almira Tanner, Jamie Crom, Omar Aicardi and Rocky Chau, animal-rights activists from a group calling itself Direct Action Everywhere, lit purple flares, fastened themselves together with interlocking pipes and sprawled on the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. The protest that was broken up late in the afternoon by police forced the cancellation of one race and pushing six others back to that night. The San Jose Mercury-News said 17 protesters lined up at the entrance to the track, forcing Berkeley’s health department to cancel 200 appointments for COVID vaccinations that were being provided in a parking-lot facility.

July 16, 2023. The Stronach Group scrambled to confirm John Cherwa’s story in the Los Angeles Times that Golden Gate Fields would be closed permanently Dec. 19 with all the company’s West Coast racing resources directed to Southern California. Stronach executives said Golden Gate had been losing money for years and that it saw no viable financial future for the track.

Sept. 21, 2023. After lawmakers approved what amounted to a Stronach Group request to send simulcast dollars to Southern California on dates when there was no racing in the north, the California Horse Racing Board approved dates that would keep Golden Gate Fields open until early June.

March 21, 2024. The CHRB voted 6-0 to approve a new 26-day fall meet at Pleasanton to help fill the void left by the closing of Golden Gate Fields. The board said it would wait until summer to license Golden State Racing, the new organization being formed by the California Association of Racing Fairs.

June 9, 2024. More than 83 years after it staged its first card, Golden Gate Fields hosted its final race.