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Originally Posted by pointman
Roosevelt Raceway highlights why demolishing tracks and building certainly is not always a good thing. Today where it used to stand are a bunch of stores that just duplicate the bunch of stores within a few miles of the area, a mall about a mile away from one of the biggest malls on long island that is headlined by a company (Fortunoff) which has gone out of business and has nothing you really can't get at the Roosevelt Field Mall or locally, and a housing project which sits empty 20 years after the destruction due to the greed of its developers. It has also had the effect of bringing more traffic to an area which the last thing the area needs is more traffic.
The author of the article makes a lot of sense, just because the land is there doesn't mean that one has to put up commercial businesses, housing and a park. Who needs another park anyway?
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The Roosevelt Raceway thing was criminal. A few "horseman" got the town to issue tax free bonds to buy the place with the pledge to keep it as a racetrack. But almost as soon as they took control they began cutting costs and staff and made it as unprofitable as they could to cover their tracks in order to declare it too unprofitable to continue and sell to developers for a lot more than they purchased it for. It was tied up in court for years but in the end they made out like bandits.