Roosevelt Raceway

Roosevelt Raceway was a race track located just outside the village of Westbury on Long Island, New York.

Initially created as a venue for the 1936 Vanderbilt Cup auto race, it was converted to a ½-mile harness racing facility (the actual circumference was 100 feet shorter). The harness racing facility operated from September 2, 1940, until July 15, 1988.

It was the original home of the Messenger Stakes, part of the Triple Crown of Harness Racing for Pacers. The raceway hosted the event until it closed. It was also the first track to use the now universal "mobile starting gate".

The facility was sold in 1984 on the condition it was to remain an operating racetrack, but the facilities deteriorated, attendance dropped off, and the track was no longer profitable.

The site of Roosevelt Raceway is part of the Hempstead Plains, located in an unincorporated area of the Town of Hempstead, within the Westbury 11590 Zip Code. It is located near where the first English colonial Governor of New York, Richard Nicolls, established the "Newmarket Course", the first horse-racing track in North America (and the first organized sport of any kind) in the territory that would become the United States, in 1664.

Following the end of the Great Depression, George Washington Vanderbilt III, George Preston Marshall and Eddie Rickenbacker raised money to build a home for a revived Vanderbilt Cup, which had been dormant since its last running in 1916. 1908 Vanderbilt Cup winner George Robertson was hired to oversee construction of the facility. The land was acquired by lease of the land that was "Unit 2" of the Roosevelt Field airport, and was the site of the runway from which Charles Lindbergh took off in the Spirit of St. Louis.

The track for the 1936 event was twisty and bumpy, not quite suited to the big-bore big-BHP racecars of the day, and a number of the drivers did not like the track. The layout for the 1937 event was faster, with fewer corners and longer straights. Despite these adaptations, no Indy car races were held there afterwards, although Roosevelt Raceway was the site of the 1939 National Midget auto racing championship. The track has been recreated in at least two racing games, Spirit of Speed 1937 and the Grand Prix Legends racing simulation.

The property was leased in 1939 by a group of investors (Old Country Trotting Association) led by George Morton Levy with the intention of opening a harness racing track. However, unlike previous incarnations of the sport, Levy's track would race at night, with single heat races, in an attempt to bring the "hick sport" to the populous Long Island area. With World War II in progress, attendance and profit were minimal in the first few years. The track opened September 2, 1940 with a crowd of 5,000 which bet a total of $40,742 and saw the first race won by the horse "Martha Lee".