Elmont Gets a Racetrack That Runs All Winter
Belmont reopens September 18 with a synthetic winter track, and Aqueduct's racing moves to Elmont for good. What year-round race days mean for Nassau.
By Melville Chamber of Commerce ·
Live racing returns to Elmont on Thursday, September 18, when the rebuilt Belmont Park opens its fall meet with the $1 million Jockey Club Gold Cup. The meet runs Thursday through Sunday until December 6. That much is a calendar entry. The part worth a Long Island operator's attention is what the state bought with $455 million, because it changes the shape of the year in western Nassau rather than just reopening a gate.
What $455 million actually built
The money came as a loan approved in the state's FY24 enacted budget. The New York Racing Association tore down a grandstand of roughly 1.25 million square feet and replaced it with a five-story building of about 300,000 square feet, designed by the architecture firm Populous. The footprint shrank by more than three quarters. The land that came back is green space.
Four racing surfaces were built or rebuilt: the main dirt track, two turf courses, and a new one-mile Tapeta surface. Tapeta is a synthetic all-weather track, and the state's own description of the project names it as the exclusive surface for winter racing. That single detail is the one that matters here, and it is easy to read past.
The winter track is the whole point
Downstate thoroughbred racing has run on a seasonal rotation for decades, with Aqueduct in Queens carrying the winter dates. A track that can run in January removes the reason for that rotation. Under the state's plan, racing operations move from Aqueduct to Belmont when the new facility is complete and do not move back, and the state intends to reimagine the 100 or more acres Aqueduct leaves behind.
So Elmont is not getting its old schedule returned to it. It is getting Aqueduct's schedule added on top. A venue that went dark for stretches of the calendar is becoming a year-round operation on the Nassau side of the Queens line.
The numbers the state attached to it
New York put figures on both halves of this. On construction: roughly $1 billion in construction-related economic impact and about 3,700 construction-related jobs. On operations, once the facility is running: about $155 million in annual economic output and roughly $10 million a year in new state and local tax revenue.
Treat the operating figures the way you would treat any projection published by the party seeking the appropriation. They are a forecast, not a receipt. But the direction is not really in dispute, and the mechanism behind it is simple enough to check yourself: race days generate food, beverage, security, cleaning, transportation, parking and hospitality demand, and the number of race days in Elmont is going up rather than returning to what it was.
What NYRA is selling
Admission for the fall meet starts at $7. Above that sit grandstand seating, box seats, and a set of premium products including Champion Suites and lounges the association has branded The Overlook and The Stretch View. The hospitality inventory in the new building is the commercial answer to the smaller footprint: fewer square feet, more of them sold.
Two dates are already on the calendar beyond this meet. The Belmont Stakes returns to Belmont Park in 2027 after running at Saratoga during construction, and the Breeders' Cup World Championships come to the track in 2027 for the first time in more than two decades.
What it means for members
If your business sells to, staffs for, or hires in western Nassau, the seasonal assumption you have been planning around is now wrong. A venue that ran on a partial calendar is about to run eleven weeks of Thursday-to-Sunday dates and then keep running through the winter, permanently, with two national events landing in 2027.
The practical move is to stop treating Belmont demand as a spring-and-fall spike in your forecast and start treating it as a floor. For a caterer, a staffing firm, a security contractor, a linen or beverage supplier, or a transportation operator, that means bidding for annual terms rather than event-by-event work while the new operation is still setting its vendor list. For anyone hiring hourly in Elmont, Floral Park, Franklin Square or Valley Stream, it means a year-round competitor for the same shift workers, starting next Thursday, and a hiring calendar that no longer has a quiet quarter to recruit in.
And if you are looking at space anywhere on that corridor, the 2027 dates are the number to plan a lease around, not this month's opening.
