At Pimlico, a Storied Era Fades in the Backstretch

It was 7:30 in the morning, and the backstretch of Pimlico Race Course was way too quiet for Donnie Rideoutt.

Usually, the 55-year-old stable hand would have been deep in the early-hour bustle of mucking out stalls and bridling and hosing down horses hot from their gallops. But this morning, the barns were deserted, the track was still, and instead of wrangling horses, Rideoutt was forcing a thin mattress into the back of a dented car.

"It's a ghost town, a sad day in Bedrock," Rideoutt said between carrying armloads of clothes down from his small quarters, a cinder block room above now-empty stalls. A fast-fading whiff of hay and manure is about all that remains of the 400 horses that have been trailered away in recent days. "One of the oldest racetracks in North America, and there won't be a horse here. I guess the rats will run free now."

Rideoutt was one of the last of the 120 resident stable workers to clear out after the announcement last month that the Pimlico barns would close in early September, victims of racing's steady decline at the historic track. Less than a month's notice was given.

Although Pimlico isn't closing, its schedule has been whittled down to a single series of spring races, including the Preakness Stakes. And the backstretch, the fabled corner where the Maryland Jockey Club provided free stalls for racehorses and free rooms for the people who cared for them, will be open only during the spring races.

"We're in survival mode," said Mike Gathagan, a spokesman for the jockey club, which moved most of the horses and stable workers to its training barns in Laurel and Bowie. "It was costing $180,000 a month to keep the Pimlico stabling area open. We're cutting races and doing everything we can to be competitive."

In Maryland racing, all eyes are on the statewide slots initiative on the November ballot. If they are legalized, slots could pump millions of dollars into the struggling industry. Regardless of the outcome, few predict that the Pimlico backstretch will return full time.

"I don't think it'll ever be back, to be honest," said Rideoutt, who has a short-term job breaking yearlings at a horse farm in Davidsonville and hopes to find permanent work at the Bowie track, 30 miles away. His life could take on the migrant nature of the earlier days of Maryland racing, when the trainers moved their animals and workers from track to track with each meet. "I'll go where the horses are. I haven't done anything else in 40 years."

The closing of the backstretch marks the passing of an unlikely patch of urban horse country, one that drew its grooms, hot-walkers and stable hands largely from the surrounding inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore. At most tracks, the resident army of low-wage workers who keep the thoroughbreds ready to run is now made up mostly of Latino immigrants. At Pimlico, about half of the workforce was black.

"It's the end of an era around here," said Gail Boozer, who has run a corner grocery across the street from the stables for 17 years. "It's so quiet. We used to hear the horses all day long."

"Miss Gail," as the Pimlico hands called her, would come out from behind her Plexiglas windows several times a day and cross Belvedere Avenue to sell cigarettes and sodas through the high chain-link fence separating the equestrian world from the city streets. She has already felt the drop-off in business, she said, and has decided to close on Sundays. "I feel so sorry for them. They treated those horses like they was their kids. Some of them are too old to do anything else."

Some of the old-timers aren't straying too far as their stable days end. James Carr, 68, had been a groom at Pimlico off-and-on for more than 40 years when he was recently sidelined by a bad case of gout. He moved across the street to Weinberg Place, a senior high-rise at Belvedere and Preakness Way. Two of his former backstretch colleagues have applied to move in since the stables closed, Carr said.