No Horsing Around : National Museum of Racing Reopens at Saratoga After a $6 Million Facelift

Whitney Tower, president of the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, was eating breakfast at a Saratoga Springs diner one morning last year when a man approached him.

“I was at the museum during a field trip in the third grade,” the middle-aged man told Tower. “I haven’t been back since.”

“That’s the way a lot of people felt,” Tower said recently.

They shouldn’t anymore. The museum re-opened in late July following a 10-month, $6 million renovation project, and Tower is betting on it to bring back the patrons it lost over the years and to attract more racing--and non-racing--fans than ever before.

Though it’s located across stately Union Avenue from the 125-year-old Saratoga Race Course, scene of some of thoroughbred horse racing’s greatest upsets, the museum had become too staid a showcase for such an exciting sport. Its exhibits were mostly of the look-but-don’t touch variety, with room after room filled with racing silks, trophies and platters, and equine paintings.

Now the museum’s directors and staff are confident they have a national museum to rival those honoring other sports, such as the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., and the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

In what Director David J. Zdunczyk calls a “night-and-day transformation,” the museum now employs videos, films and cassette tapes along with photographs, paintings and artifacts to trace the 300-year-old history of horse racing in America.

“I think we have one of the most sophisticated sports halls of fame and fine arts galleries in the world,” Zdunczyk said.

It wasn’t that way three years ago, when the museum’s trustees decided something had to be done to revive the museum. They hired the British husband-and-wife teams of Kenneth Pearson and Patricia Connor, and Ivor and Bridget Heal, who had created a similar racing museum in Newmarket, England, the cradle of thoroughbred racing.

“Any museum that doesn’t change its exhibition techniques and displays has really missed the mark in being educational,” Zdunczyk said. “There are two charges museums have--one is preserve and collect, and the second is to interpret, to explain, to educate. We weren’t doing that at all.”

Educating young and old alike about racing is one goal of the museum. Educational programs for children in grades four and up begin in September. Another goal is to get people back into the 33-year-old brick building. Attendance for 1986, the last full year of operation, was about 75,000 after five years of steady decline, Tower said.

“It was just too much the same year in and year out,” said Tower, who expects attendance to double by the end of 1989. “We’ve probably overused the word static and bland, but that’s what it was. It wasn’t very alive.”

Though 95% of the artifacts from the old exhibits are included in the new ones, previous visitors to the rejuvenated museum will scarcely recognize it.

Visitors enter the museum next to a life-size, three-stall starting gate display, complete with horse and jockey breaking from the gate.

In one room, posters, paintings and trophies detail racing’s beginnings in colonial America, when even George Washington kept exact records of his betting losses.

Another room is dominated by a large, glass-encased skeleton of a thoroughbred in full stride. The next is filled with cardboard cutouts of race track railbirds, some facing a full-sized tote board, its numbers changing as if someone with a hot tip had just placed a bundle on Secretariat.

Nearby, banks of telephones carry recorded information on how betting odds are established. Trainers such as D. Wayne Lucas and Jack Van Berg and jockeys Angel Cordero Jr. and Eddie Maple explain their trades on other phones.

In the Hall of Fame room, jockey silks of such noted stables and owners as Calumet Farm and Claiborne Farm, the Phippses, the du Ponts, Whitneys and Vanderbilts are displayed above the plaques of the hall’s 239 members: 119 horses, 57 trainers and 63 jockeys. Six video booths allow visitors to punch up film clips and information on the inductees.

The Hall of Fame room doubles as an auditorium during the screening of the unnarrated film “Race America.” Black curtains automatically cover the plaques and jockey silk displays as Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” fills the room. For the next 18 minutes, montages of every aspect of the racing game flash across the screen, many of them offering a horse’s-eye-view of the happenings.

Other exhibits include replicas of trainer Charlie Whittingham’s barn at Santa Anita Race Track, the paddock at Hialeah Race Track in the 1930s and a jockey’s room. There’s also a room dedicated to the 11 Triple Crown winners, and two rooms about Saratoga itself, one depicting a Spa hotel during its golden age in the 1890s and the other about today’s track.

Yet another room has been set aside for the 42 18th- and 19th-century English equine paintings owned by horseman Paul Mellon. The paintings, many of which have never been displayed for the public, will be in Saratoga through Oct. 10.

Whereas the old museum had free admission, there’s now a $2 charge for adults, $1 for students and senior citizens. But Tower and Zdunczyk don’t expect that to be a problem, especially now that the crowds have hit Saratoga for its annual 24-day August racing meet.

“We call it the best $2 bet in town,” Tower said.

That may be the closest thing to a sure thing in this horse-crazy town.