By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews — Maryland on the Map, Part 5
On race day, the bow-tied fans arrive. They fill the infield, drink the Black-Eyed Susans, watch the horses run, and leave. Then Park Heights goes back to being Park Heights.
That dynamic — one of the most prominent sporting events in America dropping into one of Baltimore’s most distressed neighborhoods and generating almost nothing for the people who live there — is the subtext beneath every official statement about the $400 million Pimlico redevelopment. It is also the central question that Maryland has not yet answered: after 154 years of the Preakness running in Park Heights, will this investment finally change the relationship between the racetrack and the community surrounding it, or will it be another promise that ends when the last horse crosses the finish line?
A Neighborhood That Has Heard This Before
Park Heights today is largely poor and more than 96 percent African American, a demographic shift that occurred relatively quickly during the 1960s as a result of social, economic, racial, and political factors that reshaped the city. Once a destination for upwardly mobile Jewish and African-American families, the Northwest Baltimore neighborhood became nearly synonymous with decline — its vacant homes and empty lots the outward signs of decades of depopulation, poverty, drug dealing, and violence.
Pimlico Race Course opened in 1870 and triggered the development of nearby hotels, restaurants, and other entertainment venues. Those venues are now gone. One day a year, during the Preakness Stakes, it draws national attention and crowds of more than 100,000 to Park Heights. For the other 364 days, residents say, the racetrack has been an anchor on the neighborhood rather than an engine for it.
The pattern of promised investment followed by limited results is not new. In 1977, Park Heights and neighboring communities began receiving special grants from the state — called local impact funds — to help cover costs of the extra trash and traffic the racetrack creates. The grants topped out at around $550,000 before being discontinued in 2012 as casinos began opening in the state.
When casino revenues replaced the local impact grants, skepticism among residents ran deep. “Everyone keeps playing the lotto,” said one resident waiting for lunch near a convenience store that sold lottery tickets. “And everyone just keeps getting poorer and poorer.”
The chairman of Park Heights Renaissance at the time — the nonprofit charged with leading the neighborhood’s revitalization — was blunt about the racetrack’s legacy. “I wish Pimlico would be gone,” said Larry Jennings, who grew up near the track. “It’s literally a zero 360 days of the year, except for Preakness.”
Preakness Day Is Not a Good Day for Local Business
One of the more striking details about the Preakness’s relationship with Park Heights is that race day itself has historically been bad for the neighborhood’s small businesses — not good.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, who grew up in Park Heights, has reflected that the Preakness created horrendous traffic, terrible parking restrictions, and an onerous police presence that accompanied race days. “When I was growing up, we felt like Preakness was in Park Heights but not for Park Heights,” Scott said.
Community development leader Yolanda Jiggetts noted that local Park Heights businesses historically lose money during the Preakness, even with crowds in the thousands that are sufficient to disrupt everyday activity in the neighborhood.
Habtom Woldemariam, owner of Knight’s Discount Liquor near Pimlico, described losing business during the construction period. “When I came here first, I never saw business like that day. It was good business,” he said. “But in two years, we lose business. We don’t make business. I wish good business for everybody. I’m hoping for better.”
That a neighborhood hosting one of the most attended single-day sporting events in America has seen its small businesses decline rather than grow around it is no accident. It is the predictable result of an event that has never been designed to integrate with its surrounding community — an event that walls itself off on race day and then disappears.
What the $400 Million Is Supposed to Change
The official case for the Pimlico redevelopment leans heavily on the argument that this time is different — that the rebuild is a community investment, not just a venue upgrade.
The project dedicates 10 percent of annual track profits to strengthening the Park Heights neighborhood. The new facility will support over 500 jobs and go from hosting approximately 15 racing days per year to becoming the permanent home of Maryland Thoroughbred racing with more than 100 racing days annually.
Park Heights Renaissance CEO Yolanda Jiggetts — a Park Heights native — said the organization has been working with neighbors and businesses to prepare for major events and welcome visitors into the community. “Park Heights is coming together like never before,” Jiggetts said. “We see the Pimlico as a complement to all of the other projects that are happening. Hopefully, it will redesign racing so that it is inclusive, so that people are not only going there to race, but that they are going there to have dinner, they are going there to have happy hour.”
Jiggetts said working on development as a public-private-community partnership would ensure neighbors who already live there have a say in what happens next. This, she said, would ward off business and neighbor displacement.
Those are encouraging words from someone with deep roots in the neighborhood. But they are also words that Park Heights has heard, in various forms, for decades.
The Broader Redevelopment Picture
The Pimlico rebuild is not happening in isolation. Park Heights has a genuine, if slow-moving, wave of investment underway that predates the racetrack project and runs parallel to it.
A Baltimore nonprofit recently secured $44 million to build a mixed-use community on Belvedere Avenue near the racetrack, including 83 units of affordable rental housing and commercial business space, assembled from 10 vacant and underutilized parcels. Mayor Scott designated Park Heights as the city’s newest Baltimore Main Streets district in 2024, citing nearly 1,000 residential units in the pipeline and the $400 million racetrack redevelopment as anchors for a commercial revitalization effort.
The neighborhood has also seen school renovations under the state’s 21st Century Schools Program, recreation center upgrades funded in part by Pimlico Local Impact Aid, and transit-oriented development near the West Cold Spring Metro station.
These are real investments. They represent genuine progress in a neighborhood that has needed all of it for a long time. The question is whether the Pimlico redevelopment accelerates and sustains that momentum, or whether it follows the pattern its predecessor set — a prominent presence in Park Heights that generates energy once a year and delivers limited benefit to the people who live there year-round.
The Test Is Still Ahead
There is a version of this story that ends well. A rebuilt Pimlico with 100-plus racing days a year, a hotel, event space, and genuine year-round foot traffic could become the economic anchor that Park Heights has never had. If 10 percent of track profits consistently flow back to the neighborhood, and if the small businesses along Park Heights Avenue and Reisterstown Road learn to capture race-day and event-day spending rather than lose it to traffic disruption, the investment could mean something real for the people who have lived in its shadow for generations.
But the history is what it is. As Park Heights Renaissance director Cheo Hurley put it in an earlier era of redevelopment promises: “These are 50-plus years’ worth of problems we’re trying to tackle here. You’re not going to turn it around overnight.” Long-time resident Shirley Dett, who has watched plans come and go since 1967, was more direct: “They board houses up, and then they stay boarded up. We have the mayor and everybody coming down here saying what they’re going to do. They need to hurry up.”
Maryland just committed $400 million to a racetrack in one of its most distressed communities. The community has been promised before. The accountability for whether this one delivers belongs not just to the Maryland Stadium Authority and the horse racing industry — it belongs to every elected official who voted for it and every journalist covering it.
The Preakness will return to a rebuilt Pimlico in 2027. Park Heights will be watching.
Maryland on the Map is an ongoing MDBayNews series on the state’s sporting economy and public investment in major events.
Sources: Baltimore Sun (Park Heights redevelopment reporting, 2016–2019); CBS Baltimore/WJZ (Pimlico redevelopment coverage, May 2025; Park Heights affordable housing, January 2026); Taxpayers Protection Alliance (Pimlico analysis, May 2024); CNS Maryland (Park Heights gambling revenue reporting); Wikipedia/Park Heights neighborhood history; Baltimore City Department of Planning, Park Heights Master Plan; Baltimore City Mayor’s Office press releases (Main Streets designation, May 2024); Baltimore Development Corporation; Maryland Stadium Authority; MTROA project documents.
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