Belmont Park is officially open again. Three years and roughly $555 million after the old track ran its last card in July 2023, the New York Racing Association returned live racing to Elmont on Friday, September 18, before a sold-out crowd of 6,000. Standing over the rebuilt grounds is a new five-story grandstand designed by Populous, replacing the building that had stood since 1968, and the calendar behind it already holds the Belmont Stakes and the Breeders' Cup for 2027.
Two of the five levels are open now. Published figures put the building between 275,000 and 300,000 square feet, and AECOM Tishman handled construction. NYRA executive vice president Glen Kozak told NY1 the new building is "about as modern a facility as anyone is going to see" in racing, a line that carries extra weight set against the 1968 date on the one it replaced.
Below the grandstand, the main course is still the mile-and-a-half oval, the largest dirt track in North America, so the distance that has decided the Belmont Stakes for a century stays exactly where it was while everything around it changed. Four racing surfaces now share the property, including a one-mile Tapeta synthetic oval and two turf courses. The infield, about 20 acres of it, is open to spectators for the first time. Opening weekend was headlined by the $1 million Grade 1 Jockey Club Gold Cup.
Friday's 6,000 was the opening capacity. At full buildout the venue is planned for about 50,000 on major race days, more than eight times that crowd and a match for Saratoga.
All of it sits at 2150 Hempstead Turnpike in Elmont, on the Queens-Nassau border. The new grandstand rises beside UBS Arena on the Belmont grounds, giving that stretch of Hempstead Turnpike two purpose-built venues. For Populous, it lands the same year the firm's New Highmark Stadium opened in Orchard Park, at the other end of New York State, in June.
A $455 million state loan, approved in New York's fiscal 2024 budget under Governor Kathy Hochul, carried the bulk of the project, with NYRA's own track and surface work making up the balance of the roughly $555 million total. At $10 million a year, the tax figure alone would need more than 45 years to cover the loan. The broader projected return is about $155 million in annual economic output alongside that $10 million a year in added state and local tax revenue.
The next piece of the building arrives in spring 2027, when the upper floors, premium suites and banquet spaces are scheduled to open above the two levels running today. That is also the year the Belmont Stakes comes home after three runnings at Saratoga Springs, and the year Belmont Park hosts the Breeders' Cup World Championships, the first held in New York since 2005. With the suites set for spring and the Breeders' Cup following that fall, the rebuild's first full year doubles as the biggest racing calendar New York has staged in more than two decades, and the first real test of what $555 million bought.