To Karin De Francis, Pimlico Race Course is alive.

That won‘t make much sense to most visitors to America‘s second-oldest racetrack, who will see crumbling and condemned buildings with cracked and broken windows, warped and crooked with age. If there was ever a tidy metaphor for the ailing state of the horse racing industry, Pimlico is all too on the nose.

But when De Francis walks through the course that her family used to own, even on quiet days — and there are many more of those than there used to be — her own memory fills the space. She can hear old conversations and classic race calls playing in her head. She can picture the scenes of horsemen and suited-up patrons sifting through the grandstand and the grounds.

Most personally, it’s a place where her father, Frank De Francis, who died in 1989, feels alive, too. She can hear his words, guiding her still.

“Well it’s hard to step foot on this place without thinking of him,” she said. “He died too young. Above and beyond any responsibility I felt — I didn‘t want to disappoint him.”

From 1986 to 2007, the De Francis family were owners (either wholly or with partners) of Pimlico. Even when they bought it, the track was a dilapidated headquarters for a state horse racing industry in desperate need of saving. In the years since the Stronach family took over stewardship, Pimlico’s degradation has only become more dire — leading to Maryland’s state takeover of the track and a grandly ambitious plan to tear down its structures and rebuild it with $500 million of bond money.

But, for all of racing’s problems attracting casual fans, it has never really lost its diehards — the people for whom the industry is a way of life that they’re fighting ferociously to preserve. It is these folks who feel the poignant tug-of-war between the need for Pimlico racing to modernize to survive and the powerful appeal of its nostalgia and tradition.

Kimber Goodwin, a handicapper who worked at Pimlico for years, feels the buzz of history. As she passes picnic tables, she envisions a crowd of jockeys seated there in afternoons long past. She imagines the dignitaries who flocked to the Preakness, their lengthy entourages trailing them like peacock feathers.

“It’s almost like seeing ghosts,” she said.

These horse racing lifers understand — maybe more than anyone — that Pimlico needs dramatic changes for Maryland’s venerated industry to survive.

But the most difficult part of saying goodbye to the Old Hilltop they’ve known so well is letting go of the ghosts they see and hear with every step.

‘She still gets to look beautiful for one more day’

On Saturday, a gathering a year in the making coalesced at Suite 5 in the Pimlico infield. Karin and her brother, longtime Pimlico and Maryland Jockey Club executive Joe De Francis, invited the people they still call “the team,” longtime track and racing employees who shared the scrappy bonding experience of keeping Pimlico running. Borrowing the longtime infield moniker of “The People’s Party,” the De Francis family called the reunion “Our People’s Party.”

Before the big day, the last Preakness at Pimlico before the demolition and remodel begin, they shared a list of memories via email — many of them chaotic moments that the passing of time has transformed into stories they can giggle about now.

There was the fire in the jockey kitchen. The time in 1999 when a drunk fan ran on the track and tried, in vain, to take a swing at the horse Artax.

There were also somber moments. In 2002, the first Preakness after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Pimlico brought in the American flag that flew over the Pentagon to the track, presented by a military color guard.

Looking out on the grandstand, Goodwin said she felt the memories of all the Preaknesses past wallop her at once. That morning, she had sent out a list of odds to the party’s attendees, including a very specific prop bet: “I’m first to cry, 4/5.” She let out a sobbing laugh at her own predictive prowess as she wiped away tears.

“I just feel like she [Pimlico] is just this older lady that you can still dress up,” Goodwin said. “Even though she’s got aches and pains, she still gets to look beautiful for one more day.”

Even on days when Pimlico’s aging infrastructure has gotten in the way of the Preakness, there are bright spots to those who lived those days. Kelly James was hired by the De Francis family as a hostess in Laurel in 1987, a job she felt grateful to get because she is blind. James was one of the people charged with getting trophy presenters to the winner’s circle in 1998, when a transformer blew near the track, leaving the grandstand and backstretch without power.

It was a disastrous day for the track, which lost more than $2 million in wagers. But, even when the track grew dark, all of the trophy presenters, including then-Gov. Parris Glendening, made it to the winner’s circle on the network broadcast’s schedule — because a blind woman was leading them there.

“Kelly can‘t see anyway,” her husband, Jeff James, said. “She can use her other senses to get where she needs to go.”

That, however, is not the most special Pimlico memory for the James family. On Preakness Day in 1990, Kelly’s co-workers conspired with Jeff (then her boyfriend) to bring her to the winner’s circle for a trophy presentation. Jeff hopped the fence, got down on one knee and proposed. A picture of the moment from 35 years ago hangs on the wall of the family dining room.

Jeff and Kelly couldn‘t revisit the site of the proposal — “today is about our team, not us,” Kelly said — and, in a few years, the circle probably won‘t look the same. A place and a moment that had huge significance to them will be forever altered — which is not a reason to stop change but what makes it hard in the first place.

Jeff thinks of old Memorial Stadium, which stopped hosting MLB games in 1991 and NFL games in 1997 before it was razed in 2001. He had many fond memories there but almost never hears them discussed anymore.

“It’s sort of like the new generation never knew Memorial Stadium ever existed,” he said. “That’s kind of what I wonder about the new Pimlico.

“When they knock it down, will anybody even remember what happened here?”

A plea for history’s sake

Pimlico is in such disrepair that Maryland doesn‘t have much luxury to weigh the tension between the future and the past. The horse industry — its breeders, trainers, riders and track employees — is counting on the state to turn around the downward trend of their livelihood. The economic questions of coming years take clear precedence over the nostalgic yearning for the track to maintain its traditional character.

That doesn‘t stop some of the traditionalists from speaking out.

On the track’s Sunrise Tours, offered the week of the Preakness, guide and historian April Smith offered pearls of her vast knowledge of Pimlico history. In the track’s heyday, the railroad constructed a special spur that led trains carrying horses right to the track. She points out the fire-blackened weathervane that sat atop the old clubhouse when it burned down in 1966 (it and other track artifacts were rediscovered by an employee years later in the grandstand’s “Colored Men‘s Restroom,” a reminder that not all of the track’s past drips with nostalgia).

Smith led curious spectators past the glass doors leading to the condemned grandstand as she talked about Seabiscuit’s 1938 win over War Admiral, then called the “Match of the Century,” and calls the building “the last silent witness” of the race.

“... as I keep trying to remind them,” she added as an irritated punctuation, adding to a long list of pieces of the old track she hopes will be saved.

Few of these opinionated traditionalists have a direct line to the Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority, which took the lead over Pimlico’s renovation in the last two years. The Maryland Stadium Authority and the Maryland Economic Development Corp. will pick up duties once the authority officially ends in June.

Among the horsemen in particular, there is a great deal of anxiety about the future of the Preakness barns, which have housed race champions for more than a century. Bobby Lillis, a longtime jockey and backstretch advocate who serves as a commissioner for the Maryland Racing Commission, is insistent that someone in the stadium authority needs to make sure the barns are saved: “Where we’re standing right now, we’re standing on hallowed ground.”

What victories the track’s more nostalgic fans have gotten are more pragmatic than emotional. The state’s initial plan to rotate the track — which would have forever altered the sloped dimensions of the historic oval — were scrapped in part because it would be far too expensive to achieve.

“The fact that they ran out of money to turn it, that was a work of God,” Lillis said. “You got people’s ashes spread around there. You got the track that Secretariat ran on. American Pharoah. Alydar. Affirmed. Seattle Slew. All the heavies. When you change the course, you change history.”

The diminutive Lillis’ eyes reddened as he recounted his own journey in the industry — as a hot walker, a groomer, a jockey and an exercise rider. He would ride horses in the morning, then work as a parking lot attendant at night.

If it sounds like a hardscrabble living, Lillis wouldn‘t paint it that way. He got his sons through college, and he carved out a life — one he loved.

“I don‘t know any other life than life at the racetrack,” he said.

Pimlico’s ‘family’

Karin De Francis had another life before being thrust back into racing in her early adulthood. She was a deputy district attorney in California in 1989 when her father, who had reinvigorated Laurel’s racetrack and was trying to do the same for Pimlico, died of a heart attack at 62.

Quickly, her priorities shifted. She moved back to Maryland in 1990 to run the track with her brother Joe and the Manfuso family, their business partners.

She had grown up loving horses. Her mother took her to the backstretch as a baby, and she first rode horses when she was 2. Family vacations were singing to the Broadway musical “Mame” as they drove to Delaware Park to watch horse races.

Being an executive was not as fun initially. De Francis remembers the blank stares she received from a conference room full of male colleagues when she excitedly announced she had converted her office to a playroom so she could keep an eye on her children at work. “I’m smiling ear to ear like a big dummy, and they’re all looking at me like I have five heads on my shoulder.”

But those who worked closely with the De Francis family have a fondness for that time, when the owners were locals who were down in the trenches with them. Said Ryan Kelly, a 17-year track employee: “Everybody had everybody’s back out here.”

Added Jeff James: “It was more like a family, and now it’s a lot more corporate.”

Hunched over a photo album in her suite Saturday, every image brought a memory hurtling to Karin‘s lips. She remembered rambling van rides to the Belmont with the team, wearing sweatpants and beer-can hair curlers to stay fresh for the race. She recounted striding every inch of the infield with her VP of security, Willie Coleman, a meticulous man who worked for her father and taught her everything she knew about crowd control.

Her enthusiasm for the past muted only slightly as her fingers traced the pictures of people who had died, some only in the last year. “These people here are some of the finest people I’ve ever known in my life,” she said several times as she reminisced.

Karin was a presence at Pimlico even after her family sold the track, working as a consultant who helped launch Infield Fest in 2009 and drew big musical acts to town. Before she left the track in 2018, Pimlico hosted some of the biggest crowds in its history.

Current employees in all areas — security, wagering, bartending, facilities — flocked to her suite throughout the day in a celebration of what Pimlico has been to them all these years (it was one of the great shortcomings of the day that Joe was unable to attend with illness).

But her heart has always been in the horses, her interest rooted deeply in the track’s history, which dates to 1870. She’s one of the people who wants to see the Preakness barns survive, and she hopes for a robust museum on the future grounds.

But she also thinks of her son, Frank (named for her late father), who is getting married this summer. She’ll be excited to see him off on a new chapter of life, but she’ll be grieving the old chapter, too.

“You’re excited for the experiences they’re going to be having, for the life they’re going to be creating, for the roots they’re going to be putting down,” she said. “But you still mourn the fact that you’re not gonna pick them up from school anymore, or they’re not gonna run to you when they have an issue, or you’re not gonna be the first person in their life when some issue comes up.

“That’s how I feel about Pimlico.”

What’s yet to come

The group gathered outside in the sunshine for photos, pinning their ornate sun hats down with their hands in the stiff winds. A few of the men smoked cigars, the odor of cigar smoke — synonymous here with having a winning horse — wafting gently on the porch to the turf itself.

They talked about the duct tape and caulk holding the old buildings together, understanding they need to be leveled but mourning them all the same. They hoped for the return of crowds and big-name sponsors that could fill Pimlico’s coffers again.

They quietly fretted if the state’s ambitious timeline of finishing renovations in two years would come to pass, or worried that this plan, like so many others they had seen before, would fizzle out before the industry and the track they’ve loved could be saved. Cynical observers questioned if they could trust the timeline until the money is spent.

But there has been ample time for mourning, and there will be time for worrying to come. The attendees of Our People’s Party tried to focus on the reasons they had come together: to celebrate Pimlico and each other’s company. Even as they laughed at how much they had changed from the 30-year-old pictures — “I can‘t believe I wore overalls back then,” Karin exclaimed at one point — they also marveled at how it felt so little time had passed.

No one may know Pimlico better than they do, and no one knows better that change must come, no matter how much it hurts. When she feels anxiety about the future of a track that she hopes generations to come will get a chance to love as much as she does, Karin, again, hears her father’s words.

He’d sign off every letter with a line his own father used, one that guides Karin‘s optimism about Pimlico’s future: “The best is yet to come.”