Longacres Sold, Closes Its Doors

The last race has been run at Longacres, the longtime fixture of thoroughbred racing in the Northwest.

The 57-year-old race track, which ended its meeting last week, has been sold to the Boeing Co., it was announced Thursday.

Terms of the sale were not announced, although King County has valued the 215-acre property at $23.5 million.

Longacres, the only track in the Seattle area, will not be open for racing next year, sending shivers through the state’s horse racing industry, especially its breeders. The state licenses 12,000 industry workers, said Dan Agnew, president of the Washington Breeders Assn.

“We’re very concerned about this,” Agnew said. “I’m afraid if we lose racing for a period of time, we’re going to lose a lot of our owners and patrons.”

Morrie, Michael and Ken Alhadeff, who owned the track, said they decided it “was no longer economically viable for us to operate,” because of increased property values combined with declining revenues, increasing expenses and other factors.

“This is a very unfortunate and difficult time. This is not easy. But the realities are we cannot operate as we prefer,” Morrie Alhadeff said at a news conference.

The Alhadeffs said Boeing told them they could continue to operate Longacres for “up to three years” as a transition period but they elected to close it now because “we just felt it was not viable.”

Boeing, which was not represented at the news conference, said in a release that it planned to develop the property but had not decided what activities will be located at the site.

Until recently, Longacres, about two miles south of Seattle, was surrounded by farmland. But the area now is rapidly being built up.

The Alhadeffs said they were convinced that a new race course “will be built within two years in western Washington.”

A thoroughbred owner, Mark Dedomenico, said this week that he had assembled a group of 15 to 20 people who have pledged a total of $100 million to build a new track in the Seattle area if Longacres was sold and closed.