Belmont Park and Long Island
The racetrack, grandstand, training and barn facilities are located entirely in the community of Elmont in Nassau County, New York. According to the City of New York's own map portal, the Long Island Rail Road station on the property, the ramp between the grandstand and the train station, and some of the adjoining parking fields straddle the Queens County line.
Belmont Park has direct on- and off-ramps to the Cross Island Parkway, which runs north-south and is just to the west of the park. Belmont Park's physical address is given as 2150 Hempstead Turnpike (New York State Route 24).
The Belmont Park property originally totaled some 650 acres (2.6 km2). Because the property stretched slightly into Queens, bookmakers in the track's early days—when bookmaking was illegal—could escape arrest from one county's authorities by jumping over the border. It was once even believed that horses rounding the far turn crossed into Queens and then came back to Nassau for the stretch run.
After the 1956 season, the construction of a wider bus road beyond the main course's final turn forced the turn to be shortened. According to the Belmont publication commemorating the track's 1968 reopening, that move cut 96 feet (29 m) off its circumference. The current layout has the entire racing course inside Nassau County.
Belmont Park being located in Elmont is a coincidence. The western Nassau County hamlet is not named for the track's founding family. Residents decided to change the area's name from Foster's Meadow to Elmont in 1882, 23 years before Belmont's inaugural. Probably since Elmont was a new, relatively unknown community, the Opening Day program in 1905 carries the legend "Queens, Long Island" — for Queens Village, the established community closest to the property. Nassau County, in which virtually all the Belmont property is located, had been established just six years earlier.
Read more about this topic: Belmont Park
Famous quotes containing the words belmont, park, long and/or island:
“We use important words too frequently and they lose value; for instance, charm and great. An actor or musician often is proclaimed great when we really mean he is outstanding.”
—Eleanor Robson Belmont (1878–1979)
“Borrow a child and get on welfare.
Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don’t talk
back ...”
—Susan Griffin (b. 1943)
“They will visit you at your convenience, whether you are lonesome or not, on rainy days or fair. They propose themselves as either transient acquaintances or permanent friends. They will stay as long as you like, departing or returning as you wish. Their friendship entails no obligation. Best of all, and not always true of our merely human friends, they have Cleopatra’s infinite variety.”
—Clifton Fadiman (b. 1904)
“The shifting islands! who would not be willing that his house should be undermined by such a foe! The inhabitant of an island can tell what currents formed the land which he cultivates; and his earth is still being created or destroyed. There before his door, perchance, still empties the stream which brought down the material of his farm ages before, and is still bringing it down or washing it away,—the graceful, gentle robber!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)