April Smith might not exactly fit the stereotypical image of a cigar-chomping, visor-wearing weekday horse race bettor. “I’m 5-foot-2, 106 pounds, and a woman of a certain age,” she says. (Her twin sister won’t allow her to reveal the precise number.)

But on the days the Ruxton resident leaves her house to visit Pimlico Race Course, she is as much a regular as anyone else at the track. “I go down there to bet,” she says.

People always ask why. “‘Oh, that’s a terrible neighborhood,’ they tell me,” Smith says of Park Heights, where Pimlico—the Home of the Preakness, as the dilapidated signs say outside—is located.

First, she says, there’s not much to worry about on the 110- acre, largely desolate plot of land. Outside of Preakness week, when traffic backs up on I-83 and neighbors look to make money selling parking spots, afternoons at the track tend to be pretty sleepy. At most, a few dozen bettors might stroll across the linoleum floor in the mid-century-modern clubhouse, put down money at a teller’s window, and watch races from other parts of the country simulcast on the televisions.

But more importantly, Smith says, “There’s just something about the place.” And she’s not talking about the 150-year- old track’s well-documented warts. (Just a few of those warts: the outdated clubhouse that opened in 1960; the now condemned, century-old north-end grandstand; and the mismatched 1950s-era enclosed grandstand building between them.)

Horses race on Pimlico’s one-mile dirt oval no more than 12 days each year, but when Smith goes there, visions of races past, like Seabiscuit’s famous Great Depression-era battle with War Admiral, seem to rise from the dirt. The echoes of massive crowds, spanning generations, that have walked the grounds each third Saturday of May, nearly reverberate off the walls. And the stories of Preakness Stakes champions such as Secretariat, the 1973 winner who owns the race record, and celebrity trainers like silver- haired Bob Baffert, who have come seeking the eternal glory of the second jewel of the world-renowned Triple Crown, are shared frequently.

“The ghosts of Pimlico are still there,” Smith says. “You have to be half-dead to not sit there and have it wash over you.”

Born in Baltimore and raised in Annapolis in a sailing family, Smith, a history buff and longtime local tour guide, got turned on to horse racing in 2003 when the Triple Crown longshot Funny Cide passed through Pimlico. Smith quickly learned to appreciate the historic significance in her own backyard, figuratively and now literally.

From 2006 to 2015, she led sunrise tours of Pimlico’s stables each Preakness week, sharing all that she knew about Old Hilltop, as it was nicknamed in the 1800s. She is the very active co-moderator of the Friends of Pimlico Facebook group. She owns three horses—two of which live in a barn on her home property—and shovels manure every morning. Earlier this year, she converted her adult son’s former bedroom into a Pimlico shrine, complete with jars of dirt from the track.

In short, she simply loves the history of the real thing, just a 15-minute drive away. Sure, a serious upgrade may be long overdue. That became obvious back in 1998 when an electrical fire knocked out power on Preakness Day. But as the 146th running of the famed Preakness approaches this May, Smith fears a bit too much of Pimlico’s priceless authenticity will eventually disappear forever. That is, if everything she’s read and heard about the track’s long-awaited and closer- than-ever redevelopment plans is true.

What to do with the decrepit Pimlico Race Course has been a source of endless talks, studies, and disputes for decades. Should the property be renovated or razed? Would the state take it over? How did its condition deteriorate to this point? Should the Preakness move 30 miles south to Laurel Racetrack, the preference of Pimlico owner Belinda Stronach?

Finally, in October 2019, negotiators representing three groups—the city, the Canadian-based Stronach Group, and the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association—reached a surprising agreement: to keep the Preakness in Baltimore, at Pimlico, but in a completely reimagined venue.

The deal includes designs to tear down basically everything that is there now, rotate the dirt oval 30 degrees, and build a scaled-down clubhouse. It also calls to convert the remaining land into a mixed-use, $180-million public venue (think concerts, youth sports, and other events) that could help transform the neighboring Park Heights community.

During the negotiations about the track’s future, Belinda Stronach agreed to cede ownership of Pimlico’s 110 acres, valued at $50 million, to the city. In exchange, $155 million in state funds would be allocated for improvements to Laurel—the year-round working track of Maryland’s billion-dollar racing industry—which Stronach had once eyed as a “supertrack” to host Preakness, too. The plans for Laurel feature a mini-city of sorts—space for roughly 1,500 stalls to house the state’s thoroughbreds.

But the Stronach Group isn’t completely out of the Pimlico business. The arrangement calls for most of the 80 acres outside of the reconfigured track to be held or sold by the city for redevelopment.

The remaining property, including the new clubhouse and infield, will be used as a fully public space for 10 months of the year. But for roughly two months leading up to and just after Preakness, operations will be handed back over to The Stronach Group, which will pay between $8 and $10 million a year to build out temporary tents for corporate suites, seating, and other infrastructure for the big race, then tear it all down once it’s over.

In other words, if you’re expecting to show up to Preakness in a few years and see an uber-glamorous structure like Kentucky’s Churchill Downs, don’t hold your breath. Those in charge of overseeing the rebuilding of Pimlico and Laurel—the folks at the Maryland Stadium Authority, who led the construction of Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium—say we have to be realistic.

“The new permanent structure needs to be iconic,” says Stadium Authority executive Gary McGuigan, who is directing the project, “but iconic doesn’t mean it’s the biggest thing in the world.”

For someone like Smith, one of Pimlico’s most passionate fans, the final result will very likely be an unwanted departure from tradition, and perhaps feel like a purely made-for-TV event as opposed to the genuine attraction that it is now. Six turf sports fields may replace the dirt infield that’s there today, and there are no plans for any grand structure like the one that’s now visible from Northern Parkway.

When news of the redevelopment pact broke, Smith was able to see some of the early renderings. What she saw was a much smaller, glass-walled, white-roofed clubhouse, with temporary suites scattered around it on Preakness Day. The structure looked to her like a sterile Kleenex box or the much-maligned Denver airport, lacking character befitting Pimlico’s rich history.

Practically speaking, Smith understands Pimlico is a “neglected historic site. The old grandstand leaks like a sieve,” she says. “You’ve got tubs collecting water there. But I’m not a big fan of the new plan. If they want to get rid of the clubhouse, I can live with that, but there are certain features that should be saved.”

Like, for example, the four-ton, 30- foot long bas-relief sculpture at the building’s entrance—it depicts an 1877 match race at Pimlico that shut down Congress for a day so legislators could attend—and the solid timbers that the 127-year-old grandstand is made from. “We don’t allow trees to get that old anymore,” she says. “They’re irreplaceable.”

Other critics lament the use of nearly $400 million in state funds—even if most of the money is coming from revenue already earmarked for the state horse racing industry— for what many consider a dying sport, despite its tradition in the city and state.

Still, the deal keeps the Super Bowl- like event of Preakness in Baltimore, a tradition that started in May of 1873, two years before the first Kentucky Derby. And for the surrounding community across Park Heights, Winner, and Belvedere Avenues, the redevelopment represents a chance to seriously invest in a low-income, high-crime area that has enjoyed relatively little direct economic benefit from the estimated $30 million or so that Preakness generates for the Baltimore area each year.

 

“PIMLICO CAN’T JUST BE IN PARK HEIGHTS, BUT IT HAS TO BE FOR PARK HEIGHTS, TOO.”

 

Studies have shown that the life expectancy in Park Heights—whose north end begins at Pimlico—is more than 10 years shorter than for those living in upper-middle-class Mount Washington a mere mile away on the other side of the track.

The goal for developers and neighborhood leaders, like Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, who grew up blocks from Pimlico, is to use the land to create more year-round jobs, perhaps through a hotel and a grocery store that will serve both residents and adjacent Sinai Hospital’s employees and patients.

“Pimlico can’t just be something that’s in Park Heights, but it has to be for Park Heights too,” says Scott, who attended his first Preakness in 2019 after becoming City Council president. “My lasting memory is the world descending on my neighborhood, then the next day we were forgotten again, and that’s what I’m trying to make sure that we don’t do anymore.”

As for the idea that money might be better spent elsewhere, Scott says, “Why not invest in Pimlico? As we go through this process of redeveloping Park Heights through a lens of equity, why can’t we invest in something big and spectacular in a neighborhood that has significantly been under-invested in? People need to see that investment, just like in other places in the city.”

If you’ve driven past Pimlico lately, you’ll notice nothing has changed, and it likely won’t for a while. Most of the year, you may see a horse galloping around the track with an exercise rider or being led to or from the stables, but you’re just as likely to see no activity. The starting gate rests unused near Northern Parkway.

For 50 weeks, no races are run. Trash whips around the media parking lot and a handful of off-track bettors come and go from the south grandstand entrance. In February, The Stadium Authority selected the project’s lead design firm, downtown-based Ayers Saint Gross. New ground won’t be broken for at least two years, according to McGuigan, as more contractors are selected and various tax agreements and land-transfer details are worked out between The Stronach Group, Baltimore City, and Anne Arundel County.

What’s more, logistics may dictate work starting at the year-round Laurel facility before Pimlico, which means “there will be a Preakness, one or two, that will be at an unfinished facility,” McGuigan warns.

The framework of a reinvented Pimlico is already set in law, though. Specifically, the Racing and Community Development Act of 2020, which passed in the state legislature last May. It was the result of focused negotiations that began with a break-the-ice meeting between former Baltimore City Mayor Jack Young and Belinda Stronach in her chalet tent at the 2019 Preakness and ended with an announcement five months later.

It was surprising news, given the extremely private and relatively quick nature of the negotiations. In recent years, discussions about the future of Pimlico had been marked mainly by public back-and-forth between the interested parties and contentious Annapolis hearings.

In fact, on the day Young met with Stronach, a lawsuit filed by Young’s predecessor, Catherine Pugh, seeking not only the rights to Pimlico property but also the intellectual property of the Preakness, right down to the Woodlawn Vase given out to the winner, was still pending.

After the Healthy Holly children’s book scandal put Young in the Mayor’s office, the sides agreed to start over at the urging of intermediaries, namely Bill Cole, the former city councilman and CEO of the Baltimore Development Corporation; Joe De Francis, Pimlico and Laurel’s former owner (along with his sister) who completed his sale of both tracks to Frank Stronach, Belinda’s father, in 2007; and Alan Rifkin, an attorney for Preakness Stakes and the Maryland Jockey Club, which is owned by The Stronach Group.

On Preakness Day 2019, “It just so happened that the Mayor found his way into Belinda Stronach’s tent,” Rifkin recalls. Young, the East Baltimore native, and Stronach, the Canadian who inherited her father’s horse racing empire, chatted off in a corner for about 10 minutes. They agreed to “put away the swords,” Rifkin says, “and come up with a way to resolve the problem.”

A little more than a week after the 2019 Preakness Stakes, Rifkin started renewed discussions with the city (with Cole as its negotiator) and brought Horseman’s Association president Alan Foreman, representing state horse trainers and owners, to the talks.

Ultimately, the group settled on a potential combination of redeploying funds from the state’s existing Racetrack Facility Renewal Account ($8.5 million annually), Horseman Associations’ purse revenue ($5 million), and a portion of the city’s annual slot-machine revenue from the state ($3.5 million) to raise an estimated $17 million per year to pay off a 30-year state-issued bond for the work at Laurel and Pimlico. From there, Stronach agreed to hand over Pimlico to the city, while retaining rights to the Preakness itself.

“That was extraordinary,” says Rifkin. “It was a transformative moment. Pimlico has been for so many years a barrier between communities. As a result of this project, it will become a bridge between communities.”

What the bridge looks like in the end remains to be seen. Those early public renderings might not look like the final product. Even Rifkin, a member of the group who commissioned the images, says as much, explaining that they were mostly needed to give legislators a visual of what could be possible, not what will definitely happen. McGuigan, of the Stadium Authority, says the same.

“Will it look like those initial renderings that were shown?” he says. “It might, but there’s going be a lot more ideas thrown around the next year or two.”

There will be public meetings and no doubt various asks and opinions from different stakeholders in what happens at Pimlico: the city, neighbors, politicians, horse owners, trainers, jockeys, and most certainly Friends of Pimlico like April Smith. At this point in the saga of Pimlico, Smith recognizes the need to remake the track, but doesn’t want to feel like the place lost its identity when she shows up to bet or simply reminisce.

Forget the ghosts, she says. The ashes of several actual people—equine professionals and enthusiasts alike, including 1909 Preakness-winning jockey Willie Doyle—have been scattered across the property, further proof of how much the track has meant to people over the decades.

“This is hallowed ground,” Smith says. “As rundown as Pimlico is, it breaks attendance records every year because everybody knows that this is the real thing. When I go, invariably I’ll start talking to somebody, and they always tell me that they love just being there, just sitting there and taking it in. It’s not just a figment of my imagination.”

The world froze for about two minutes on November 1, 1938. Cars idled, and people leaned on doors and windows, listening. Families gathered around living room consoles, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt paused his cabinet meeting and turned on the radio. All dials were tuned to a broadcast live from Pimlico Race Course, where a beloved underdog and a dominating force in the world of horse racing would face off on the muddy track to finally settle the question: Who’s the greater horse, Seabiscuit or War Admiral?

The largest radio audience in history was listening when Clem McCarthy called it: “Seabiscuit by three! Seabiscuit by three! Seabiscuit is the winner by four lengths!” An ugly little horse from California had beaten a Triple Crown champion, and it wasn’t even that close.

Whether you’re a fan of sports or not, you’ve probably heard of Seabiscuit. Eighty years later, the race persists in our collective memory partially because of the sport’s epic proportions at the time and mostly because of its pop culture resurgence. While the average person in 2018 probably can’t name a race outside the jewels in the Triple Crown, horses and jockeys were once as popular as baseball and basketball stars today.

“They used to get 60,000 [spectators] on a normal Saturday, and now it’s just the total opposite,” says National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame historian Allan Carter. “But you could make an argument that it was the most popular spectator sport in the United States. Good horses ran a lot longer than they do now, too.”

Fans would track horses they liked the way people track their fantasy football teams now, and though they didn’t have all-hours access to highlights and statistics, radio allowed fans to tune in to races across the country for free.

Legendary as it might be among horse-racing fans, part of the legacy of this epic matchup must be attributed to Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend, which was turned into a blockbuster film. Hillenbrand brought to light the history and endearing details of a race that loomed large in the memories of those who experienced it, but had been forgotten by many.

“When I was shopping the book around, people didn’t know who Seabiscuit was anymore,” says Hillenbrand. “But this race, it still is something that’s remembered. And I think that’s because of two names. I don’t want to give War Admiral the short shrift. He was magnificent. But Seabiscuit, more than any horse before or since, captured the American imagination in a permanent way.”

Seabiscuit’s path to greatness wasn’t a direct route. He was foaled in Lexington, Kentucky, and sired by Hard Tack, a son of Man o’ War. Despite good breeding and an all-time great trainer in “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons, Seabiscuit made a bad impression on those around him and finished poorly in his first 17 races. His ornery nature wasn’t worth cracking for the prestigious Wheatley Stable of Kentucky, even after he showed some promise in his two-year-old season.

So, in August 1936, Seabiscuit was sold off to auto magnate Charles S. Howard for $8,000 and entrusted to trainer Tom Smith. The unorthodox trainer and the undersized, knobby-kneed horse got on famously, and with Canadian jockey Red Pollard on his back, Seabiscuit began to come into his own. And as he won more and more races, he also won over the American public.

“He wasn’t very pretty. He looked like America. He looked the way people felt about themselves.”

The country was still in the depths of the Great Depression, and one in five Americans was out of work. People needed an escape, and they needed something to root for. The meteoric rises of radio and Seabiscuit provided both.

“Americans have a very deep-set belief that people can rise from anywhere and succeed. And the Depression blew that away,” says Hillenbrand. “People attached themselves to Seabiscuit, not simply because he was such an extraordinary athlete . . . this was a horse from the wrong side of the tracks, from a very unfashionable sire, and he came from the West, which was considered the backwater of horse racing. And he wasn’t very pretty. He looked like America. He looked the way people felt about themselves. People attached themselves to him, and he ran as their proxy.”

He became beloved and ubiquitous. During Hillenbrand’s research for her second book, Unbroken, Olympic runner and army veteran Louis Zamperini told her stories of listening to Seabiscuit’s races over the loudspeakers at his own track competitions. Scores of men would stop running and crowds would go silent so they could hear how the horse was doing.

While Seabiscuit was winning hearts and minds, War Admiral was winning the 1937 Kentucky Derby, Belmont Stakes, and Preakness Stakes to make him the fourth-ever Triple Crown champion. A son of the great Man o’ War (yes, Seabiscuit and War Admiral would have been nephew and uncle if horses kept track of that sort of thing), War Admiral had met and exceeded all expectations, clinching the Triple Crown even after shearing off part of his hoof during the start of the Belmont Stakes. He appeared in the winner’s circle having set a track record and with his belly covered in blood.

War Admiral beat out Seabiscuit, 1937’s top earner, for Horse of the Year, and by the time the Admiral recovered from his Belmont injury and returned to racing, fans of the sport were clamoring for a race between the East Coast great and the West Coast people’s champion.

When Seabiscuit crossed the finish line to win the Bay Meadows Handicap in April 1938, he was met with a crowd chanting, “Bring on War Admiral!” “They were [both] just extraordinary,” says Hillenbrand. “Everyone wanted to see a match race.”

Although match races, events pitting just two or three horses against one another, are no longer run, they were once a fairly regular part of the sport. Man o’ War won a 1920 contest with first-ever Triple Crown winner Sir Barton, and in 1955, Nashua, of Maryland’s Belair Stud, won a grudge match of sorts against Swaps, who had beaten him in the Kentucky Derby that year. But match racing came to an abrupt halt in 1975, when star filly Ruffian was tested against Derby champion Foolish Pleasure. Horse racing’s battle of the sexes ended in tragedy when Ruffian broke down on the backstretch at Belmont, snapping both sesamoid bones in her right foreleg. The event was witnessed by a full crowd at Belmont, as well as a stunned television audience. Ruffian was put down shortly after.

“That ended match races forever. It sickened the country, and they said this really is not the way to go,” says Carter. “I think a horse’s worth is proven more in a race with seven other great horses rather than a match race, because the horse that’s a speed horse will normally beat one that comes off the pace [paces itself against its competition]. In Seabiscuit’s case, he did something he’d never done before.”

Despite the newsreels, radio broadcasts, and sportswriters encouraging the public’s call for a matchup between the racing giants, War Admiral’s owner, Samuel Riddle, was reluctant to schedule the event. Months of bad tracks, scratches, and interpersonal issues among owners and trainers delayed a meeting between Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Finally, Pimlico President Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt II successfully arranged for the event to be held at his Baltimore track. The young Maryland Jockey Club president saw the value that could come from hosting what would be billed as “The Race of the Century.” The news broke October 5, 1938. The long-awaited race was on, and it was set for Opening Day at Pimlico, November 1.

With a sly “So long, Charlie!” from Woolf that would go down in history, he and Seabiscuit were gone.

“Because of Mr. Vanderbilt’s charisma and connections and enthusiasm, he managed to convince Sam Riddle, who didn’t want War Admiral to race,” says April Smith, a Pimlico advocate and former tour guide at the track. “[Riddle] thought his horse had proven enough. But Vanderbilt said just think how great it would be for the sport and how your horse would really go down in history and managed to convince him.”

His reluctance was assuaged partially by an agreement that War Admiral would compete only if Riddle was able to dictate the circumstances of the race. Because War Admiral didn’t do well with starting gates (a relatively new addition to the sport), it was determined that the race would be a bell start. War Admiral also held the classic match-race advantage: He was faster from the start. One-on-one, the horse that dictated the pace nearly always won the race. These two factors tipped the odds—and the betting—heavily in War Admiral’s favor. What those placing their bets didn’t know, however, was that Smith was retraining Seabiscuit. The horse known for slower starts and playing around with his competition was learning to break fast with the help of a jerry-rigged alarm clock and a whip. With a ring and a crack behind him, Seabiscuit got faster and faster from the jump as race day approached.

When that muddy morning at Pimlico came, Seabiscuit, Tom Smith, and George Woolf, the jockey who replaced the injured Pollard for the race, were ready. Woolf had walked the track the night before and found a stretch of track near the rail that was solid. Woolf would lead Seabiscuit there, and the horse would have to do the rest.

As luck, and possibly a bit of light tampering, would have it, the bell that officials intended to use for the race went missing, and Smith gallantly supplied his own bell as the replacement. War Admiral would have the start he wanted, but Seabiscuit would have the start he knew so well.

The jockeys, Woolf on Seabiscuit and Charles Kurtsinger on War Admiral, rode to the start line on that cool afternoon for the sixth race of the day, but the only one that really mattered. Forty thousand people packed into Pimlico, and thousands more craned their necks from fences surrounding the track and perched in the rafters and trees. A steeplechase fence broke under the weight of spectators. Nominally, the stakes were $15,000 and a glittering silver trophy. But to those watching and listening, they were much higher than that.

The alarm clock bell rang, and they were off.

Woolf kept the race close at first, backing Seabiscuit off in the middle on Pollard’s advice, just long enough for the horse to get a look at his competition. Once he saw War Admiral, it was over.

It was finished in just under a minute and 57 seconds. And as the race came to its end, the celebration began. Men spilled onto the track from the infield and grandstand, ducking or jumping the rail along the way. Rowdiness, it seems, has always had its place at the track.

“When Seabiscuit crossed the wire, it was pandemonium,” says Hillenbrand. “It staggers the imagination how thrilling this race was. Seabiscuit, on fair terms, cracked War Admiral, and for Americans in that era, in that time, that the underdog won the race fair and square was everything. One American in every four was listening to that race on the radio. They could turn off the radio and feel better about themselves and their prospects in the world because that little horse pulled it off, and if he could do it, they could, too.”

Nearly a century later, it’s hard to imagine any sporting event that could quite match up to the 1938 Pimlico Special. The 1980 Miracle on Ice comes to mind, but even that wasn’t experienced by as large a portion of the population. Politicians and athletes still evoke Seabiscuit to let people know that, though no one might have expected their success, they had it in them all along.

“I have written letters and suggested for years that they put at least a plaque up at Pimlico, if not an equine statue, [stating] that this is the place, on November 1, 1938, where The Race of the Century occurred. It was important,” Smith says. “The story of this little horse became so famous, and people attach themselves to heroes.”

The thrill of the race was over in moments, and the horses and their jockeys are long gone. Even the storied track at Pimlico may soon be lost to time as Laurel Park continues to grow. But The Pimlico Special endures not only as one of the ultimate examples of greatness found in the unlikeliest of places, but as a moment of joy and unity amidst dark days. The kind that it’s hard to imagine anymore. In the midst of the Depression and in a world careening toward war, people stopped and listened, and then they cheered.