This was good for the private capital business, but doom for the track. This same year, Churchill Downs Incorporated sold the track to the Bay Meadows Land Company, owned by Stockbridge Capital Group, for $260 million in cash. (Hollywood Park is actually in Inglewood.) The casino itself is the gray building to its left.) In the distance, you can see the skyline of the West Wilshire region and the Hollywood Hills, topped by the HOLLYWOOD sign.

(Look closely and you’ll see the word CASINO in red on the roof of the nearest grandstand. We’ll start in January 2005:Īt this time the racetrack was long past its prime but still functioning along with the casino. In this album on Flickr are 91 photos of that change. Between 20, I shot many dozens of photos of the racetrack site (along with the adjacent Hollywood Park Casino) from its last working days as a racetrack to the completion of SoFi Stadium (with the casino’s relocation to a corner of what had been the Racetrack’s parking lot). I’ve also photographed that change over the course of seventeen years, through those same windows. What interests me about this change is that I’ve enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of it, while approaching Los Angeles International Airport on commercial passenger planes. Whether or not, few alive today remember when only baseball was more popular than horse racing in the U.S. Perhaps this was the day Seabiscuit won his inaugural Gold Cup. Note the parking lot: immense and almost completely filled with cars. The picture above (via this Martin Turnbull story) is an aerial view of the racetrack in 1938, shortly after it opened. Wikipedia says the park-Ĭonsists of over 8.5 million square feet (790,000 m 2) that will be used for office space and condominiums, a 12-screen Cinepolis movie theater, ballrooms, outdoor spaces for community programming, retail, a fitness center, a luxury hotel, a brewery, up-scale restaurants and an open-air shopping and entertainment complex. There’s also more to come in the surrounding vastness of Hollywood Park, named after the racetrack.

In its place is SoFi Stadium, the 77,000-seat home of Los Angeles’ two pro football teams and much else, including the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater.

Hollywood Park Casino vs commerce