This is from the book
Not by a Long Shot: A Season at a Hard Luck Horse Track written by TD Thornton, the subject of my journalist profile. I wish I could do justice through my profile to his writing. It's his desscription of arriving at Suffolk Downs Race Track. It's very different from mine!
Although it would be difficult to mistake the 190-acre parcel of property for anything other than a horse track if viewed from above or seen on a map, Suffolk Downs at street level is perplexingly hidden from view by its own insular neighborhood along the heavily congested airport road three miles north of downtown Boston. Fenced off behind twists of barbed wire at an irregular corner where the reckless undulation of Revere Beach Parkway bisects trash-strewn Route 1A, the 65-year-old facility hulks hard by the clatter of the Blue Line subway, just a few furlongs from the offshore blasts and roiling winter riptide of the Atlantic Ocean.
Approaching from the city, soon after the barrage of billboards gives way to the skinny side streets of tightly packed triple-decker apartment buildings that comprise Orient Heights, the first and most obvious racetrack landmark is the Madonna Queen National Shrine, a 35-foot Virgin Mary standing unintentional but benevolent guard over Suffolk Downs and its surroundings. Erected in honor of an Italian apostle who once proclaimed “Beside every work of charity shall stand a work of faith,” the Catholic monolith stands on a lonely hillside overlooking a gargantuan industrial fuel farm. Three dozen squat, multi-story tanks block any available frontage for a quarter mile along 1A, sprawling north past the border where East Boston meets Revere—the city that rhymes with severe, and historical home of the nation’s first public beach. In the domineering shadow of the oil yard, the highway landscape becomes a blurry hodgepodge of suspicious used car lots and auto body shops, surly gas stations, a greasy diner, and a smoke-filled bar called the Esquire Club that closely resembles a 1950’s atomic bomb shelter.
Bending to the right onto the Route 145 parkway at the corner, where traffic lights are ruthlessly ignored and street signs have been rendered unreadable by graffiti, the beach road to the racetrack is lined on one side with functional blue-collar houses opposite a row of decaying, vacant buildings, a cramped, bare trailer park, and the occasional grocery cart from the nearby mega-mart abandoned to rust in a culvert of thick brown reeds. Farther east but before the road meets the sea is the modest Beachmont neighborhood, dotted with storefront coffee and sandwich shops, small ethnic restaurants with names like “Luigi’s,” liquor stores that do brisk business in nips and individual cigarettes, and the VFW post abutting the spacious Belle Isle Marsh tidal flats, a popular hangout frequented by birdwatchers during the day and nefarious local hoodlums after nightfall.
Turning into the track at its main stable gate, on the immediate left is the barn area, home to some 1,200 Thoroughbred racehorses and a hundred or so caretakers who live onsite in subsidized dormitories and tack rooms. The shed rows—numbered, white, barracks-like, one-story barns with porch-roof overhangs—are visible from outside a red wooden fence topped by slanted blue chain-link, there to either keep people out or in; no one knows for sure. The access road opens into a huge windblown parking lot, a vast expanse of potholed, pockmarked asphalt so large that Suffolk Downs rents parts of it to Logan Airport for overflow parking and to an offshore wastewater plant for use as a shuttle lot. Cast to one side are a handful of horse vans and hitch trailers parked at odd angles, salvaged either for parts, or, for the homeless, a place to sleep. Opposite the abandoned vehicles are huge, steep mountains of sand, clay, and loam that will, by closing day in June, be part of the horse track itself, added to the one-mile oval in truckloaded increments to combat erosion, attrition, and runoff.
The press parking area, where I am headed, is immediately in front of the massive tan exterior of the Suffolk Downs grandstand, built for $2.4 million in 1935 and considered for years thereafter to be the largest, most modern concrete sports facility in the nation. The building is skirted with colorful flags and green-accented awnings with the sleek but simple logo of an elongated white horse in full stride, but some of the awnings show signs of neglect and hang tattered by punishing winter winds. A cleaning crew worker, seemingly the same old Hispanic gentleman every single day, slowly pushes a wheeled garbage bin around a rectangle of pavement that decades ago used to be the fancy backyard paddock, herding and sweeping the refuse of yesterday’s losing programs, Racing Forms, and discarded tickets amid a hovering flock of mournful, scavenging gulls.
Entering the unlit grandstand hours before racing, one senses history in the shadows beneath the banks of silent television monitors and vacant, brick-walled betting stations on the sloping first-floor concourse. Unlike the close, claustrophobic layouts and generic food-court decor of newer venues, Suffolk Downs was designed to comfortably accommodate crowds upward of 40,000 on several simple, open levels in endless rows of tiered seating. Although average daily attendance has now dwindled to roughly one-tenth that initial figure, little has changed structurally. The impressive, exposed geometric framework makes the grandstand feel like an important public place in an old-fashioned kind of way. Boisterous, five-figure racetrack crowds turn out only once a year now, on Massachusetts Handicap Day just before the close of the season in June, and as I walk toward the escalators humming obediently at the far end of the muted pavilion, I gaze up to the Hall of Champions banners high above the wagering floor honoring MassCap winners from a bygone era: Top Row—1935; War Relic—1941; Market Wise—1943; Promised Land—1958. Names and years span the length of the grandstand ceiling, bright flags swaying gently in the darkened chamber; brief bits of racehorse glory and Suffolk Downs lore whose relevance is hazily recalled by a sadly diminishing few.
As I step off the escalator onto the second-floor mezzanine, taking the first left up the racetrack ramp into section 207, I am initially blinded by the eastern sun, but climbing the gradual concrete incline reveals Suffolk Downs in increments: First the black, skeletal, right-angled steelwork framing a sheer glass wall of windows; beyond that, the fallow, brown expanse of infield sprouting a bounty of scattered trees and shrubs, and within it, the hand-stenciled tote board fronting a small man-made pond fringed with a variety of winter birdlife; the perfect twin symmetry of the racecourse rails with the sleeping green turf course concentrically ensconced inside the larger, wider, banked dirt oval; the truism of the tall, striped wooden marker poles, each topped with a gold orb and solidly spaced a sixteenth of a mile apart. Then finally, the athletes themselves come into focus—scores of beautiful Thoroughbreds sweating, steaming and prancing in the morning chill; running and gunning alone, in tandems, or in teams, flaring plumes of exhaled vapor as they skip over the rich brown racing surface. The more furious trainees hug the inside Fontana rail, cornering effortlessly, while way off on the backstretch, nervous fillies and contented old geldings gallop parallel to the cacophonous subway rail that rattles through the salt marsh. An exercise girl on a patient pony schools a young, unraced prospect on a leather shank, while anonymous jockeys in blue jeans, flak jackets, and ski vests bear down astride steeds who whiz through the homestretch unencumbered by betting odds or past performances. Off in the distance, the deep waters of Massachusetts Bay sparkle crisply in the early sun.
Alone in the Suffolk Downs morning amid rows of upturned orange grandstand seats, it is easy to understand why some people come to the track for a day at the races and never leave, choosing Thoroughbreds not so much as a way to make a living, but as a way of life.
