Let’s get something straight about next Tuesday’s referendum on slot machines in Maryland. Once upon a time, they were sold as the last possible salvation for thoroughbred horse racing around here. But, with five days left until Election Day, the racetracks have become mainly an afterthought.
Thoroughbred horse racing, once one of this state’s sporting glories, now stumbles poignantly down the homestretch of its very history. Oh, the game will stick around for a while. But, if you want to see its future, drop in sometime to Pimlico on any afternoon when they’re not running the Preakness Stakes.
There you find the tattered remnants of the last generation of those who still remember when it was known as the sport of kings. As everybody knows, royalty ain’t what it used to be. At Pimlico, you see the Geritol Set camped out on lawn chairs as they sit in the semidarkness scanning TV monitors. The place has the feel of a mausoleum.
If you think slots revenues are going to bring this back to life, take a little hike up Interstate 95 for an afternoon at, say, Delaware Park. The slots parlor there is brimming with life, and there are Maryland cars all over the parking lot. But then venture out to the racetrack grandstand. The crowds are pathetic.
Yeah, the Delaware purses are bigger since the advent of slots — but it’s an entire industry artificially propped up by the one-armed bandits. In other words, it’s welfare for the horse race industry.
But, while you don’t hear so much argument these days about slots bailing out horse racing around here, it’s been replaced by a larger concern: Can they help bail out the whole state, whose economy trembles in the current national dreariness?
As The Examiner’s Len Lazarick points out elsewhere in today’s newspaper, most Marylanders seem to think it can, though many have reservations: How much crime will slots bring? How much gambling addiction? Are these worth the price of new money for schools and highways?
But all of this leaves another question unanswered, whether the slots vote passes or fails next week: What ultimately happens to racing? And, if and when the sport dries up and dies, or track owners shift the action to Laurel — what happens to Pimlico Race Course?
This is not an insubstantial question. Out in Northwest Baltimore, there was heavy anti-slots sentiment when Pimlico was slated to be one of the locations for the machines. Along lower Park Heights Avenue, residents have wondered for the last few decades why the area’s become such a municipal blight, while one mayor after another talks a good game but then takes a powder.
Why, residents have asked, are we worried about money for horse racing when we haven’t taken care of the places in Baltimore that look like Baghdad after the bombing?
On the other side of the track, in neighborhoods far healthier, residents once worried that slots at Pimlico would bring crime and unwanted traffic to the area.
And, even though state plans have changed — they no longer call for slots at Pimlico — many residents in neighborhoods such as Mount Washington and Cheswolde still view slots negatively.
But there’s another element that gives these residents a certain ambivalence.
What happens if Pimlico goes under? What happens if track owners say, “That’s enough”? Let’s move the Preakness elsewhere, let’s shift the racing action to Laurel, and let’s shut down Old Hilltop?
Among other things, the track is a buffer. It’s a buffer between those along green and stable neighborhoods around Crosscountry Boulevard and Greenspring Avenue and much of Northern Parkway — and those areas around lower Park Heights with high poverty and drug traffic and crime, and almost uncountable numbers of abandoned houses, all of which send a chill that can be felt all around Northwest Baltimore.
Mayor Sheila Dixon is the first one at City Hall in a long time to take a serious look at lower Park Heights and Reisterstown Road, and all the area side streets. She’s watched the deterioration ever since she was a high school student at Northwestern and rode through the area every day, and she’s spent a lot of hours with city planners who want to bring the area back to life.
But it isn’t going to happen overnight. And so we have Pimlico Race Course sitting there, home to the Preakness that is now its only moneymaking day of the entire year, home to a dwindling, wheezing generation of thoroughbred racing fans — and a geographical and psychological buffer between two parts of Northwest Baltimore.
One with a depressing range of highly publicized social problems.
And the other that wishes to be protected from those problems.
