July 14, 1977, New York City: A number of lightning strikes and a power company snafus the night before caused one of the largest blackouts the city had ever seen.

In contrast to the last major blackout in 1965, the night of July 13th was marred by looting and rioting. On the morning of July 14th several dozen businesses were still burning after a night of over a thousand fires. Over 3,700 people were arrested, the subways were down and the game between the Mets and Cubs never finished.

The next day, however, there was one New York establishment that offered respite from the chaos of the blackout - Belmont Park in Elmont, N.Y.

Because Belmont got power from a Nassau County power grid in Long Island, they still had juice and most of the city residents had the day off from work because of the blackout. So more than 20,000 New Yorkers made the trek to the racetrack on a Thursday morning to take in the races. Because the trains were down, many of them arrived by overcrowded buses or expensive taxi rides or even after hitching hiking. Power would be fully restored to New York City by later that day.

The city worked tirelessly along with the federal government to put contingency plans into place to avoid not only a future blackout, but to make sure there were emergency plans in place to avoid the kind of lawlessness and destruction that occurred as a consequence - plans that wouldn’t need to be tested until 2003.

For their part, Belmont officials assured racing fans that they had backup generators on site to make sure they could power the facilities even if they were hit by an outage. The message was clear - rain or shine or complete societal meltdown, the racetrack is open for business!