‘I miss the racetrack’: Five years after Arlington Park’s final race, regulars recall its legacy

Much of the attention surrounding the barren 326 acres at Euclid Avenue and Wilke Road in Arlington Heights has focused on the Chicago Bears and a possible new suburban home for the NFL team.

But there was a time when football wasn’t America’s most popular sport, a time when the sport of kings was king.

Friday marks five years since the final turn at Arlington Park, the storied thoroughbred horse racetrack that operated for 94 years and became Illinois’ grand racing palace.

Alan Henry — a retired newspaper journalist, accomplished author, former horse owner, longtime Arlington box holder and one-time Illinois Racing Board commissioner — remembers it this way:

“It was families picnicking on the grass at the top of the stretch, and office parties going full tilt in the tents. It was folks marveling at the flowers, and the massive cantilever roof, and the expansive European-style paddock. It was the bowling club high-fiving in the winner’s circle as the horse they recently claimed won its first race, and dads standing at the rail with their two-year-old on their shoulders cheering on their pick, and couples posing for pictures in front of the statue of John Henry and The Bart, and still looking like The Bart won the world’s first million dollar race.”

“This was all a part of the magic now long gone, replaced by false hopes and empty words. But it was beautiful while it lasted.”

Days after the last race on Sept. 25, 2021, track owner Churchill Downs Inc. announced a pending sale of the sprawling acreage to the Bears, who finally closed on the $197.2 million deal in 2023. The stately six-story grandstand was picked apart by demolition crews in the ensuing months and reduced to a pile of rubble by year’s end, out of a desire by the NFL franchise to cut its property tax bill.

An attempt to permanently reduce the property tax bill via legislative approvals — for an envisioned $5 billion stadium-anchored entertainment and mixed-use district — has so far remained elusive for the Bears, who are now considering moving across state lines to Hammond, Indiana.

If horse racing hadn’t already reached the finish line at Arlington before, it did with the grandstand teardown. A similar fate awaits Hawthorne Race Course in Stickney, where years of financial problems and mismanagement led to its bankruptcy last February and final race July 19.

Only Fairmount Park in downstate Collinsville — just outside of St. Louis — remains as the last horse racing venue in Illinois.

Some of Arlington Park’s regulars — the owners, trainers, jockeys, horseplayers and railbirds — have gone there. Others went to Indiana and Kentucky, enticed by larger purse money. A few have given up on the sport altogether.

Here are the stories of where some of them are now:

The announcer

John Dooley called races from atop the grandstand at Arlington since the track reopened under Churchill Downs ownership in 2000.

In a phone interview in between races at Horseshoe Indianapolis, where he’s been the past five years, Dooley recalled being behind the mic for one of the last, best moments in Illinois racing: Arlington Million Day in 2015 when The Pizza Man, an Illinois-bred long shot, won the Grade I race.

“When they were rounding the far turn, you could feel the crowd, the energy just lifting like it was Game 7 of a Cubs World Series,” Dooley said. “It really was a thrill to go there every single day to go to work. It wasn’t even work. It was just going to Arlington.”

Dooley sold his place in Arlington Heights after the track closed, and now spends summers in Indiana and winters at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, where he’s been race caller since 2004.

He still works with some of his former Arlington co-workers, including Chris Polzin, the former Arlington racing secretary who now has the same job in Indianapolis.

Dooley saw many others at a five-year employees’ reunion at Jimmy D’s District bar across the street from the old racetrack. They got together on what would have been Million Day in August.

“It’s hard to believe that five years have gone by. But just thankful for all the years that we all got to work together there,” he said.

Dooley attributed the closure of Arlington to the changing landscape of the sport and gambling industry, and drew parallels between the Bears’ current political pursuit of property tax favorability with that of the racetrack’s old owners.

Various gambling expansion bills that would have permitted slots and table games to supplement horse racing purse money didn’t make it “to the finish line” over the course of multiple governors’ administrations, Dooley said.

Finally, one did in 2019, but Churchill declined to pursue the extra gambling positions at Arlington in favor of taking a majority ownership stake down the road at Rivers Casino in Des Plaines.

“It’s unfortunate that you couldn’t see Arlington go into the future, but a lot has to do with city councils and the state and property taxes and everything that is still affecting the Bears,” Dooley said. “Fast forward to 2026, and (it’s) still an issue, and we’re talking about an entirely different franchise and a different sport. … I’m sad that it happened, but I guess changing times.”

The trainer

Larry Rivelli — who won nine training titles at Arlington, including the final eight — called closure of the local oval “probably the worst thing that’s happened to me in my career.”

But Rivelli, who still has a house in North Barrington, is nimble, mainly splitting his time between training horses in Kentucky in the spring, summer and fall, and New Orleans in the winter.

Of the 80 horses based at his barns in Kentucky, three won races last week at Fairmount, two won in Indianapolis the week before, and another won at Churchill Downs’ namesake track in Louisville that same week.

And after Arlington closed, one of his horses won a Breeders’ Cup race and another ran second in the Kentucky Derby in 2023.

“That’s why I’ve been so successful in my whole career, I would have to say it, because we go to where the race is. We’ll travel to run to be in the right spot,” Rivelli said. “A lot of this game is knowing the athlete that you have, the competition, and putting your horse in the right race. … You just got to make sure you know where you’re putting your chess pieces.”

Some former Arlington trainers went to Hawthorne and now Fairmount, but others are out of the game, Rivelli said.

Some are enticed by Kentucky’s purses — a maiden special can go for $120,000, compared with $30,000 on the old Chicago circuit — but they’re harder to get because all the best trainers in the country are there, too, Rivelli said.

Rivelli led a group of investors who tried to save Arlington in 2021, but Churchill wasn’t interested in offers from those who wanted to keep it as a racetrack.

“They didn’t want it to compete against Rivers,” he said.

But Rivelli doesn’t blame the Louisville-based horse racing and gambling corporation for its business decisions.

Even after the 2019 gambling expansion law was approved, Rivelli said that “took too long” since the company had already secured its 61% majority stake in Rivers months before.

The mutuel clerk

Marlene Brown, a mutuel clerk who spent 39 years working behind the betting windows at Arlington, does put the blame for Arlington’s demise at the hooves of Churchill.

“I can’t forgive Churchill because they’re supposed to be so big in the horse industry, the Derby and everything, and yet they didn’t care about horse racing at all,” said Brown, who also lamented political delays in getting slots at Arlington and other Illinois racetracks that are now closed. “They really never cared much about Arlington after they bought into Rivers. They really didn’t.”

Brown, of Niles, said she suspected decades ago that horse racing was in trouble when riverboat casinos started to open. She even worked for a short time as a craps dealer at casinos in Aurora and Elgin, but didn’t like that much, so she decided to spend most of her time at Arlington.

She still has lunch outings with former tellers — only a few of them got jobs at Hawthorne and off-track betting parlors — but mostly tries to keep recollections alive by reading the Arlington Park Racetrack Memories Facebook page that launched in 2021.

Sometimes those thoughts turn to sadness, and she admits she’s gone to the Arlington Park Metra station parking lot to look at the now-empty property.

“I keep having dreams of them closing and being the last day, so I have to keep going through that last day all over again and want to cry,” Brown said. “I love the racetrack. I miss the racetrack. I’m sad by all of it, and there’s a lot of other people who feel the same way.”

The fan

Five years after the track’s closure, Henry said it’s vexing to try to assess blame for the “weed-choked wasteland” that the property has become.

He had hoped that the Bears, Churchill and village and state officials could have worked together in some form so that an NFL stadium and concert venue, high-end hotel and restaurant development — and revitalized racetrack — could soon be dazzling the spacious site.

“What’s clear is that there are no clean hands among the parties involved, and a grand opportunity appears to have been fumbled away by all,” said Henry, a boxholder at Arlington for 30 years and member of the state racing regulatory panel during the track’s final year. “Turns out, (Churchill Downs) didn’t value horse racing as much as we the public hoped. And the Bears didn’t value Arlington Heights as much as we thought — at least not for now, anyway, so long as Springfield doesn’t want to pony up some real money.”

cplacek@dailyherald.com