Ten Years Later, New York City’s Off-Track Betting Is Missed
By: Joseph Fusco
Tags: Horse Racing, New York City, Health Care, Off Track Betting, Otb

Ten Years Later, New York City’s Off-Track Betting Is Missed

In 2010, New York City shut down its only legal gambling operation. The impact of OTB’s closure is still felt by the city today. Joseph Fusco Dec 3, 2020·4 min read

Once upon a time in New York, Off-Track Betting was the city’s legal bookie. It collected horse racing bets that were otherwise handled illegally in backrooms by crooks and mobsters. At its height, there were over 100 storefront betting parlors in New York City. They were the only legal place where fans could wager on horse races outside of being at the track. OTB’s parlors were as important a part of New York’s street culture as Times Square and the subway. Revered as much as it was reviled, OTB was one of the last examples of the pre-gentrified city. On December 7, 2010, NYC Off-Track Betting was shuttered by the New York State Senate, part of a calculated political hit job.

Fifty years ago, New York City Off-Track Betting was founded as a Public Benefit Corporation whose proceeds were meant to help fund the city’s schools, hospitals, and first responders. By legalizing betting, the city now collected all the untaxed dollars that once changed hands off the books, and was able to help pay down the city’s staggering budget deficit. OTB eventually earned billions of dollars for the city’s economy.

For all of OTB’s faults — and there were plenty — the policy of inclusivity in its hiring practices was ahead of its time. Starting in 1971, women, people of color, people with disabilities, the formerly incarcerated, people in recovery from substance abuse, and recently returned veterans from Vietnam, were all hired without discrimination. For many people, working at OTB was an anchor in an often unwelcoming society.

However, with the good came the bad.

For decades, OTB was like the relative we didn’t talk about at the holidays. We knew it existed, but we didn’t discuss it in polite company. Make no mistake; there were millions of OTB stories throughout the five boroughs. Everyone knew where their local OTB was. Everyone had an uncle or a parent or a friend that played at OTB. As sports journalist Bill Finley said, “Like it or not, OTB was an important part of the fabric of New York.”

There were plenty of reasons to criticize OTB parlors. They were generally unkempt, seedy establishments where social graces were not high on the list of requirements to gain entry. The patrons ranged from blue-collar workers to bankers to homeless people who just came in to get warm.

The flip side was that OTB parlors became ad hoc community centers for older people, serving as safe spaces for them to congregate. As Dr. Hazel Dukes, former OTB president and president of the NAACP New York State Conference, described it: “You would walk in there, and think you were in a retirement home. They didn’t all gamble, some of them just met people there.”

Luc Sante, the author of the classic book “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York,” perhaps said it best: “They were like the way towns set up youth facilities to keep kids off the street, well OTB was the same thing, only it kept old men off the street.”

Since its founding, OTB was a political patronage mill with each new mayor picking its president. By 2010, the once billion-dollar-a-year empire was mired in lawsuits, bankruptcy, and epic mismanagement. New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation came up with a restructuring plan that had to be approved by the New York State Senate. This was not a bailout. Shockingly, the vote along party lines closed NYC’s OTB just three weeks before Christmas. Thousands of lives were ruined. Middle-class union jobs were destroyed. A loophole left retirees without the lifetime of health care they were promised. This was before the Affordable Care Act, and by the time the State offered a solution, many OTB workers died because they lacked health care.

What happened in 2020 with the United States Postal Service felt familiar. Willful mismanagement and political motives destroying something created for the public good was done a decade ago at OTB. Imagine what NYC could have done with the funds from a well-functioning OTB during the COVID-19 pandemic. Think of the resources that could have been provided to protect our schools and first responders.

We are now a decade out from the closure of OTB. It almost seems quaint that there was once a city that had large bookstores, funky neighborhood joints, record stores, independent art house movie theaters, cool video stores, and OTB parlors where you could bet on horses. Some of these institutions are gone because the advent of new technologies made them obsolete, some because of shifts in people’s tastes in entertainment, and some because of the prohibitive costs of New York City commercial rents. But the only one that is gone because of a willful act of the state legislature is New York City Off-Track Betting.

The city has never been the same.

Joseph Fusco is a former betting clerk at Off-Track Betting, and the film director of the award-winning documentary, “Finish Line: The Rise and Demise of Off-Track Betting.”