Remembering An Oasis Among the New York City OTBs

Events / Travel
The Playwright, once a New York City OTB, was an oasis for the horeplayer looking to enjoy a pint and make a bet. (Courtesy of Playwright Irish Pub 35th Facebook page)

When I first moved to New York back in 1999, I started dating a beautiful girl from Staten Island, the daughter of two wealthy lawyers, a brilliant scholar with a bright future in law ahead of herself.

She was funny, whip-smart, good looking and rich. I felt like I had hit a home run. But one day while we were walking down 7th Avenue past the flagship OTB (Off-Track-Betting) parlor, where the Winner’s Circle Restaurant was, we saw a man exiting the place with a little boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old, holding his hand.

“That’s so sick,” she said. “How could someone take a child in a place like that?”

I knew right then and there it wasn’t going to work out between us.

It isn’t that the OTBs of NYC weren’t seedy. By 1999, they surely were in some cases. They very well may not have been a good spot to hang out with a child. But some of my fondest memories with my own father happened at the racetrack. It was hard for me to see a man dragging along his kid while he placed his bets as “sick.” Just because you have kids doesn’t mean you have to surrender all the action to the childless. Dads need to get a bet down, too.

After living in New York City for a while, I didn’t really enjoy hanging out in the OTBs. They were mostly clincal affairs. They felt like lobbies more than “parlors,” with the few chairs available always “reserved” by the early birds who draped their programs or Daily Racing Forms over the backs.

Chinatown OTB (WikiMedia Commons)

The Chinatown OTB was a particularly wild spot, with big crowds of mostly men hollering in different languages and huddling up outside to smoke and argue. But every now and then on a day off I would get a hankering to play the horses, and I didn’t want to trek all the way to Aqueduct or Belmont. Luckily, I discovered the Playwright.

The Playwright was, to most who wandered in off of West 35th Street, a typical midtown Irish pub. But it had a secret identity. It was one of the few NYC OTBs that happened to be housed in an actual food and beverage establishment. And it was probably the only NYC OTB that was in a restaurant that had edible food.

The OTB wasn’t front and center, however. There was a window where a teller could take your bet. There were a couple of kiosks where you could make bets yourself, both upstairs and downstairs. The bar kept a couple of its myriad TVs downstairs on the races. And on the second floor, they dedicated all of their screens to races. At the Playwright, the horseplayers and the civilians there to just have a pint all mixed in together. The only way to know who was who was the wads of crumpled-up loser tickets on the bar in front of the horseplayers.

I loved hanging out at the Playwright. It was a good spot for a Saturday when there was a race that I wanted to catch and I had nothing else going on. It was a nice place to duck in after a long day of work to make a couple of just-for-fun bets before I headed home. It was the best place to take uninitiated friends to watch races and make bets, next to the track itself, of course. It felt, to me anyway, like something right out of Damon Runyon. A midtown pub filled with gamblers who came and went and traded bad-beat stories and tales of triumph over drinks at the bar.

I spent a lot of time alone in those days. I worked mostly on the road and during my time off in the city, I’d explore on my own. Going to the Playwright to watch the races was always a solo trip, since so few of my friends shared my interest in the sport back then.

I remember one afternoon watching races from Saratoga at the Playwright by myself at the bar and making the acquaintance of another young man sitting next to me. He was sweating a Pick 4 that he had cleared three legs of, the last of which was a huge 60-1 longshot. He had the favorite in the final leg of the sequence and the will-pay was $20,000. I remember betting a hundred bucks on that horse to sweat it with him, as did several others in the bar. I remember watching that race with him and the other Playwright faithful as if we all had $20,000 riding on it. I also remember that feeling of having it in the bag, followed by the sickening, gut-wrenching feeling of watching the favorite get caught in the stretch — a familiar feeling for all of us, but so few of us with so much money on the line.

I remember how he put his head on the bar and moaned in pain, but also how everyone at the bar bought him drinks and cheered him on, a bunch of strangers trying to lift his spirits and get him to rally so he could get a bet down before the next race went off. I remember feeling that even though these people were not my friends, and unlike at the mythical Cheers, nobody knew my name, that on that day I wasn’t so lonely, and that I should be so lucky to miss a five-figure score at the finish line at the Playwright.

Today, the Playwright is still open. Still festooned in leather and old wood. Still serving good food and ale to those who wander in off of West 35th Street. But it is no longer a betting parlor. New York shut down its off-track betting at the end of 2010. From its first bet in 1971, the first ever legal off-track wager made in New York in nearly a half century, to the final day of betting nearly 40 years later, the NYC Off-Track-Betting parlors had become a part of the fabric of New York City. They were a slice of life, home of a subculture that many of us knew nothing about but appreciated that they were there among us, yelling at horses, swatting their programs, chomping their cigars.

Sure, there were some uptight Staten Island blue bloods who thought they were sick. But for most New Yorkers, the OTBs were welcomed as another aspect of what made New York City so unique. And for some of us, they provided a useful oasis. A place to bet the races not as professionals or addicted gamblers, but just as recreational fans of the game. And the Playwright, especially, was all of that and more. A place to get a bet down. A place to feel among friends.

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