On Sunday, James LeBlanc, who has been visiting Aqueduct Racetrack since 1964, and some 70 friends will meet up one last time for the final day of live racing before the track shuts its doors for good. “It’s going to be sad,” said LeBlanc. “I got a lot of memories here, man. A lot of memories.”
Horse racing was once among the most popular sports in America, and New York was a hotbed of activity; the earliest version of the Aqueduct Racetrack opened in 1894. In recent decades, however, the sport’s popularity has declined sharply for myriad reasons, including new and more popular ways to gamble, concerns about animal welfare, and shifting interests in sports toward ones that work better on television. And as horse racing faded from its 20th-century peak, and as technology made it possible to bet on anything from anywhere, Aqueduct would lose its place as a vital New York sporting venue.
Today, the once-massive grandstand has been reduced to just a few sections of seats; the rest has be
