Every racetrack operator's worst nightmare is a fire, and the Fair Grounds has lived through two of them.
This week in December 1993, neighbors of the New Orleans track came out of their houses around 7 p.m. to see flames coming from the racetrack's historic grandstand. Racetrackers and locals gathered in the parking lot, some crying, watching with horror as the local landmark became completely engulfed in a matter of hours.
Ty Ezell was working in the track's video department back in 1993; he's still there as a contractor today.
“It was after racing; we were setting up a microphone on the third floor of the Jockey Club for a party the next day,” Ezell remembered. “We left to go to a drugstore to get something to drink. We weren't gone ten minutes and the whole place was … you could see it glowing in the distance.”
Investigators later determined that faulty wiring near the jockeys' room sparked the blaze, which ripped through the wooden grandstand rapidly. In the end it would be a seven-alarm fire that brought 170 firefighters and 53 trucks to the scene.
At the time, the wooden Fair Grounds structure was the third-oldest in the country, having been put in place after another fire destroyed the original in 1918.
Eclipse Award-winning writer Ronnie Virgets was on-site that day. His ode to Fair Grounds ran alongside the news coverage of the fire in the Blood-Horse. Virgets recalled his youth at the track, which became his home base through the years.
“Forget Plato, skip Aquinas, shun Descartes. It's horse racing that proves the existence of God, and racetracks, plain and simple, are temples,” he wrote. “Only now the temple is being profaned by the ultimatum of change. The firehoses are working hard, but when fire reaches this intensity, it chortles at those who try to tame it. Windows pop, TV monitors explode, roofs fall, and a racetrack's history goes flying to hell somewhere in the sky.
“With each collapse, each structural yielding, comes a new revealing, a shameful disrobing of an old friend.”
Ezell remembered arriving at the track the next day by sunrise (there was no power on the front side) and seeing the metal safety rail had melted from the heat of the flames. He and friends sifted through the rubble looking for the New Orleans Handicap trophy, which had been in the building, but never found it.
If anything can be considered fortunate about a fire, the timing of the event minimized the potential for the loss of life. The barns are situated on the other side of the racing oval from the grandstand, and racing had finished for the day. There were a few customers on-site for off-track betting, but they were quickly cleared and no employees or patrons were injured, although The Blood-Horse reported two firefighters were.
Quick-thinking racing officials dragged out the fire-proof cabinets that stood in the racing office and held almost all the foal papers for the 3,000 horses on the grounds, avoiding further challenges for their trainers and owners.
The 1993 fire also hadn't been the first time racing at Fair Grounds had faced adversity – it was sold to developers in the 1940s and saved by a group of investors in the eleventh hour. Before that, racing had been banned in New Orleans between 1908 and 1915.
But racing people are tough folk, and don't let legal, financial, or natural disasters stop them in their tracks.
By the time the Christmas edition of The Blood-Horse was mailed to its subscribers, the Fair Grounds was already planning its comeback. The fire was estimated to cause $26 million in damages but within days, track ownership met with a consultant who staged the annual jazz festival at the Fair Grounds to generate some ideas.
Three days after the fire, the Blood-Horse reported a tented clubhouse was being constructed along with bleachers, while additional tents could hold a paddock area and trailers were being brought in to serve as office space and jockeys' quarters. Autotote sent a mainframe computer to the site and 100 mutuel machines were installed.
Racing restarted 19 days after the blaze and a new grandstand was opened in 1997, with its current enclosed and air-conditioned design.
“Everybody missed the old building; it had character,” Ezell said. “The old grandstand, it had these huge windows, they were wooden and glass. But they were mechanical with chains. On a nice day, half would go underground, half would go up. That was something you can't replace.
“They designed the new track so you can see the paddock from every floor, which is awesome. It's more fan-friendly, the new track.”
This local news clip features on-site reporting from Hoda Kotb in her pre-Today Show days.
Virgets and Ezell teamed up for this video piece looking back on the fire:
The post This Week In History: Fair Grounds Goes Up In Flames, Again appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
