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Remembering Jamaica - 50 years after the last race

By Bill Heller
First Published: 16 July 2009 - Issue Number: 13

There was a jewel of a racetrack in Jamaica, Queens, once. It’s been fifty years since Jamaica Racetrack ran its final card of racing, but memories linger.
“Jamaica was just as nice a place as can be,” Hall of Fame trainer Allen Jerkens said recently. “It was the best. It was so convenient. You had the nice paddock, and the paddock was enclosed. It was just wonderful.”
As difficult a concept as this is to grasp, there was a time in his legendary career that Jerkens had yet to prove himself, which is exactly what he proceeded to do at Jamaica. “That’s where I really started to get going in my career,” he said. “My first stakes race that I ever won was there at two-and-a-sixteenth miles, the last day of the meeting in 1955 with War Command. I won the Gallant Fox Handicap there with Admiral Vee, too. It was the last stakes race (Hall of Fame jockey) Teddy Atkinson won before he retired.”
Jerkens claimed War Command for $8,000 for owner Al Messler, and the five-year-old captured the first running of the 2 1/16-mile Display Handicap under Bill Boland. “He was a sprinter,” Jerkens said. “He won at five furlongs. We galloped him three miles and a half.”
Earlier in 1955, Jerkens claimed Admiral Vee for $7,500, and the colt earned more than a quarter of a million dollars.
The success of those two horses spoke volumes of Jerkens’ ability, but they were just two of hundreds of memorable winners at Jamaica.
Many of racing’s greatest Thoroughbreds campaigned at Jamaica in its 56-year history, which was interrupted from 1910 through 1913 when all forms of wagering on horse racing in the state of New York were outlawed by the New York State Legislature and Governor Charles Evans Hughes.
When racing resumed in New York, great Thoroughbreds were pointed to stakes at Jamaica.
Man o’ War won the 1919 Youthful Stakes at Jamaica by 2 ¼ lengths, then returned the following year to make pari-mutuel history in the Stuyvesant Handicap. Facing just one opponent, Yellow Hand, Man o’ War won by eight lengths at the lowest odds possible, .01-to-1. He would go off at those same odds twice more, in the Lawrence Realization and the Jockey Club Gold Cup, both at Belmont Park.
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