Today is the is the 137th running of The Preakness Stakes. It is the middle jewel in horse racing’s triple crown, and a hallmark event on the Baltimore calendar. As it has been for most every year since its inception, the event will be held at Pimlico Race Way. Indeed, Pimlico was built in 1870 for the express purpose of hosting the very first edition of this race.
The origins of the Preakness are to be found in the legendary horse racing town of Saratoga, New York. In the summer of 1868, Milton H. Sanford hosted a dinner party at the Union Hall Hotel to celebrate the end of the racing season. Sanford, who had gotten wealthy by selling blankets during the Civil War, threw a lavish affair for fellow horse owners. Among those he invited was John Hunter of New York, who suggested that theye commemorate the event with a special horse race. He proposed calling it the Dinner Party Stakes: a two-mile jaunt for three year old colts and fillies.
Governor Oden Bowie of Maryland, also in attendance that night, stunned the guests by offering to put up a purse of $15,000 for the winning horse. That’s about a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money. But as a caveat, Oden insisted that the race be run in Maryland, and he promised to build a track for the event.
By the fall of 1870, the new Pimlico Race Way was ready for business, and its first event was the inaugural running of the Dinner Party Stakes. There were seven horses in the field: two colts and five fillies. Milton Sanford, host of the original dinner party that had inspired it all, owned the winning horse, a bay colt named Preakness.
For the next couple of years, the race was known as the Dixie Handicap. But when Pimlico held its first ever Spring meet in 1873, Governor Bowie renamed the now mile-and-
a-half contest the Preakness Stakes. Two years before the first Kentucky Derby, a horse named Survivor stormed to a ten length victory in the first Preakness. Except for a brief period at the turn of the century when it was run in New York City, the Preakness has been held every year at Pimlico.
Today, Pimlico Race Way is to horse racing what Wrigley Field in Chicago or Fenway Park in Boston are to baseball: the vestige of an earlier era, when spectator sports were thoroughly integrated into the everyday fabric of city life. In particular, those facilities, and many others long since vanished, were located amid vibrant urban neighborhoods.
Pimlico was originally built in a rural area north of Baltimore. However, the city was expanding rapidly, and it wasn’t long before the race track, like so many sports complexes of that era, saw a working class neighborhood sprout up around it. Today, I live almost smack dab in the middle of Baltimore. From my house, Pimlico is only a couple of miles northwest as the crow flies, and is surrounded by row homes.
For nearly a century, one of the nation’s premier race tracks and the home of the storied Preakness Stakes sat amid a bustling urban neighborhood, which is also called Pimlico. However, like so many other Baltimore neighborhoods, this one fell on hard times during the 1970s. And of course horse racing as a spectator sport has long been in decline.
These days, Pimlico’s entire horse racing season is less than a month, and for most of that, the place is little more than a ghost town. Indeed, the company that owns the track went into bankruptcy a few years ago, and there have been repeated threats to move the Preakness Stakes to another track outside of Maryland. The truth is, if not for the Preakness, the track at Pimlico probably would have shuttered years ago, pocking the city with yet another blight.
This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the Preakness to keep the entire facility afloat. Unsurprisingly, Preakness Day at Pimlico is utter madness. As is the case at Churchill Downs on 
Kentucky Derby Day, Pimlico opens up the infield to customers, allowing it to draw well over a hundred-thousand people to the event.
But for the vast majority, the allure isn’t really horse racing of course. If it were, the place wouldn’t be on the verge of collapse. Rather, a mangled sense of tradition is exploited, and patrons are lured with a bacchanalian atmosphere. Pay one price for an infield ticket and all of your beer is free. For the last several years, the race’s official mascot has been beer-guzzling centaur named Kegasus. I wish I were making that up.
It’s all an attempt to maximize revenues by catering to people who don’t know or give a shit about racing, by turning the Preakness into a booze-soaked party in the mid-May sunshine. The result is kinda like a watered down version of Mardi Gras, with some horse racing on the side.
It’s an utter fiasco.
I love horse racing and I love Pimlico. But it seems to me that what began as dalliance for wealthy “sportsmen,” and had its heyday as an integral part of horse racing when the sport was still relevant to American popular culture, is now little more than a contrived fiesta amid a crumbling neighborhood, its main purpose little more than propping up a dilapidated facility and a fading industry. I’ll be as wistful as anyone if it comes to pass, but the time may be nigh that we say goodbye to a cherished tradition and beautiful sport in Baltimore.
