Belmont is a mess
Yesterday I made my first trip to the new Belmont Park. And in short, Belmont is now a gelding.
When getting off the LIRR, you are greeted to the the backyard entrance, and what a sterile patch of land that is. Hospital quality picnic tables on artificial turf with zero trees. Very inviting!
As you go through the bland entrance, you can make your way to the program stand, where all they have are DRF books. No classic post parade or any other publication. If you want a pocket program, those are available for free (nice!).
The paddock is quite big, and you can’t see much of the horses until they make their way onto the track. Nice video board and I like the Churchill Downs-like video board above the stalls. The paddock is probably my favorite part of the place.
Go inside the spaceship and there are a total of 5 live tellers to place your bets. 5. The humble and failing Monmouth Park has more than 5! The lines for live tellers and the self serve machines were never ending the entire day. Mind you there were maybe 7,000 people there. Absolutely absurd, and is setting up for a total disaster on Belmont Day and Breeders Cup. It is so claustrophobic you can barely move around. And this was a quarter of what their major days will be!
We had seats, and I need to speak with the moron who designed this place. At the end of the day, it is a stadium. For ALL reserved seats sections, there is a total of one singular door to go from inside up the escalator/elevator to then go to your section. Otherwise, you are forced to go up a big set of stairs to reach the seating level. How the hell did this pass fire code? Leading into each race, the pure bottle neck there was to get back to my seats is just such a bad design for a brand new place. Come around the 4th race, they started to implement a handstamp system to prove you belong out in the reserved seats, which added to the bottleneck even more.
The design of the building looks incredibly dumb next to UBS Arena, which will ironically age 10x nicer than what Belmont’s state of the art design will do. Very sad, and things are going to age like milk for NYRA with the choices made here.
The food was good at least.
Also! The design also causes a massive swing in temperature based on where you are. If you are trackside/have seats, plan for it to be about 10 degrees cooler than the backyard/paddock area.