The Long-Form Test

Esposito’s, the nearby watering hole where Billy Turner, Seattle Slew’s trainer, imbibed during his drinking days, is no longer there, having been replaced by a church.

The barn of the incomparable Woody Stephens, who died in 1998, belongs to somebody else.

The nasally race calls of the late Fred “Cappy” Capossela, the track announcer, echo only in the mind.

But Belmont Park survives. A fire in 1917 couldn’t do it in. Nor could serious construction defects and the wrecking ball in the 1960s. The historic track -- not as big as Rhode Island, but close -- has made it to its 100th birthday, celebrated on May 4, and today it will run the 137th Belmont Stakes, the climax to the Triple Crown.

The main track is a mile and a half in circumference -- easily the biggest in the U.S. -- and consequently the horses look like ants by comparison as they thunder down the backstretch. But the horses who raced here, from Man O’ War to Secretariat, who are frequently considered the greatest to run, have often been big: All 11 Triple Crown winners, the last of them Affirmed in 1978; Forego, who carried 137 pounds, including Bill Shoemaker, to win the 1976 Marlboro Cup; John Henry, who went from claiming races to championships.

You look at the grainy reruns of Forego’s Marlboro, it never looks as if Forego and Shoemaker will reach the wire in time. But they do, beating Honest Pleasure by a head. Shoemaker, who didn’t even weigh 100 pounds, looked as if he would need help carrying the saddle and the added lead weights to the scale afterward.

A trip through the leafy, pastoral barn area doesn’t let you forget the horses that ran at Belmont. The road signs carry many of their names. In the middle of the tree-lined saddling paddock is a large bronze of Secretariat, who won the 1973 Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths, running 1 1/2 miles in 2:24, breaking Gallant Man’s 16-year-old record by more than two seconds.

Take a left entering the clubhouse and you’ll run into “Woody’s corner,” a glass-enclosed tribute to the impish Stephens, who won his first Belmont Stakes in 1982 and then didn’t stop until 1987, after he had won five in succession. He did it with horses -- Conquistador Cielo, Caveat, Swale, the gelding Creme Fraiche and Danzig Connection -- who aren’t in the Racing Hall of Fame and never will be.

After trainer Wayne Lukas had won three consecutive Belmonts in the 1990s, and didn’t have a horse good enough to run in the race the next year, Stephens chortled: “Guess Wayne’ll have to start all over. Maybe someday, somebody will break my record, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Saratoga, the upstate track that’s also owned by the New York Racing Assn., is known as the “graveyard of champions” because of the famous horses that were defeated there, but Belmont also has been known for some shockers.

Assault, the 1946 Triple Crown champion, lost to Armed in a match race in 1947. Beau Purple twice knocked off Kelso, the five-time horse of the year, and Prove Out beat Secretariat.

Sadly, Ruffian, a brilliant filly, died of injuries suffered in a match race against Foolish Pleasure, a Kentucky Derby winner, in 1975.

Allen Jerkens, 76, trained both Beau Purple and Prove Out. Jerkens, who still has a full barn, gets on his stable pony every morning during training hours. Beau Purple beat Kelso in the race named after Man O’ War.

“That was the last stake run at the old Belmont,” Jerkens said.

The grandstand was virtually falling down, and Belmont’s operators -- who included Christopher Chenery, whose stud farm bred Secretariat -- raised $30 million to rebuild the track. Five Belmonts were run at Aqueduct, another of Belmont Park’s sister tracks, before racing returned here in 1968, when Stage Door Johnny won the 100th running of the Belmont.

The first 38 Belmonts were run at Jerome Park and Morris Park, tracks in the Bronx. Then in 1903, having raised more than $2 million, August Belmont II, son of a German-born financier, and his Westchester Racing Assn. partners broke ground on the original Belmont, a 650-acre site that straddled the line between New York City and Nassau County on Long Island.

Opening day, May 4, 1905, brought an estimated 40,000 curiosity seekers to Belmont. Some came by train, some by horse-drawn carriages and many by early-day motorcars. However they got there, they were trusting souls. The presiding stewards were Belmont and two other Westchester officials who were running horses in the races.

John “Bet a Million” Gates was around, willing to risk $200,000 to $300,000 on a single race, but there was no parimutuel system -- that wouldn’t hit New York until 1940 -- and bookmakers were his only outlet. The disreputable bookies were called “hurdlers,” because they’d jump fences to avoid making big payoffs.

By 1908, opposition to horse betting was in full gear. Betting horses “makes thieves, more murderers, more moral wrecks” than anything, novelist David Graham Phillips wrote in Cosmopolitan magazine. “And to deprave and debauch is its chief object.”

The Hart-Agnew bill outlawed betting at racetracks. Belmont Park tried to maintain purses through admission charges and the operators’ personal bankrolls, but in 1911 the track was closed. Other New York tracks went out of business, and the Belmont Stakes was suspended for two years.

In 1913, Belmont reopened, and bookmakers, now illegal, still flourished. If the county police tried to round them up, they’d run to the side of the track that was in New York City, where the county had no jurisdiction. They’d do the reverse once pursued on the city side. Some bookies were allowed to operate until 1934, then the betting system that’s used today arrived six years later. The photo-finish camera was introduced in 1936.

Jerkens remembers his first visit to Belmont Park as a young boy in 1941.

“I rode the lead pony [in post parades] for my father,” he said.

He got too big to be a jockey, then tried riding steeplechase horses before becoming a trainer in 1950.

“I’ve always loved Belmont Park because it’s a terrific place for a horse,” Jerkens said. “You can do so much with horses here. You can go to the training track one day, the main track the next, and even use the pony track. There’s a lot you can do to keep your horses happy.”

Current Belmont management, accused by Eliot Spitzer, the state attorney general, of mismanagement and worse, is battling to save the nonprofit New York Racing Assn’s license, which expires in 2007. NYRA was indicted and fined $3 million by the federal government on conspiracy and tax fraud charges.

Magna Entertainment, which owns Santa Anita and other tracks, is said to be interested in wresting away the franchise.

Hard to say, but Belmont Park’s next 100 years could be more interesting than what’s gone before.