Aqueduct Racetrack ends live racing after 132-year run
Aqueduct closed its live racing chapter with a final 5:44 p.m. race, ending 132-plus years as New York City’s last operating racetrack.
Aqueduct Racetrack shut down live racing Sunday with a final card capped by a 5:44 p.m. race called It Was a Good Run. NYRA said the Queens track’s closing ended more than 132 years of live racing, with Sunday’s attendance announced at 6,866.
The farewell weekend stretched across Saturday, June 27, and Sunday, June 28, with each race renamed for a horse, person, or major moment from Aqueduct’s history. NYRA also handed out commemorative containers of authentic track-used dirt from the main track to the first 1,000 guests on Sunday, a small keepsake for a venue that opened in 1894 and became New York City’s last operating racetrack.
Aqueduct will remain open for simulcasting through Monday, Sept. 7, 2026, but live racing is moving out as Belmont Park’s rebuilt facility takes over as the downstate home for the sport. NYRA plans to return the Aqueduct site to New York State after racing ends, closing the book on a parcel that sat in South Ozone Park, Queens, near John F. Kennedy International Airport and off the Belt Parkway.
The track’s long decline reflected more than nostalgia. Resorts World New York City opened next door in 2011, pulling attention and gambling dollars toward the racino model that now dominates the neighborhood. Aqueduct, once a central stage for major stakes and New York-bred racing, increasingly played second fiddle as the city’s horse-racing culture shrank and the economics of the land around it grew more valuable.
Its history still reaches deep into New York sports memory. Seabiscuit, Man o’ War, and Secretariat all ran there, and the grandstand once drew a crowd that treated winter racing in Queens as part of the city’s working-class rhythm. Richard Migliore, who made 2,238 trips to the winner’s circle at Aqueduct over a 31-year career, held the record for most victories there, a fitting marker for the final chapter of a track that helped define the sport in New York for generations.
The closing weekend folded that history into the present without pretending the old order could last. Aqueduct’s final live races ended not as a celebration of continuity, but as the formal exit of a distinct urban institution, leaving Belmont Park, simulcasting, and the state to decide what comes next for the ground it occupied for 132-plus years.
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