The list of Pimlico Race Course’s failings is so familiar it borders on cliché.

The lone elevator stopped working years ago. A section of the grandstand was condemned in 2019. The toilets can’t always be trusted to hold up to the demands of tens of thousands of Preakness Stakes patrons.

Pimlico is among the homeliest venues for a major U.S. sporting event, maybe the single most run-down if you ask visiting sports writers. Maryland officials have argued over how to replace it for three-quarters of a century.

But, as the dilapidated facility prepares to host Preakness for the last time before it is demolished and reforged in a shinier guise, this week is also a time to celebrate Pimlico’s low-key charm.

Trainers who run elite thoroughbreds all over the world cherish the intimate atmosphere around the stakes barn and the casual friendliness of the many workers who make Preakness week possible. The second jewel of the Triple Crown series has always felt more approachable than its siblings in Kentucky and New York. It has offered a stage for some of the most memorable equine performances in history: Secretariat‘s blinding move to the front in 1973, Sunday Silence’s duel with Easy Goer in 1989, American Pharoah’s floating trip over the mud in 2015.

Ghosts of great Preaknesses past will live again as anticipation builds for Saturday’s 150th running of Maryland’s signature race.

Will anyone shed a tear for the track itself? Yes, actually, though the answer to that question is a bit messy.

John Scheinman, who has attended races at Pimlico for more than 40 years as a fan, Washington Post journalist and loudly enthusiastic bettor, borrowed a phrase from late track historian Joe Kelly to sum the place up.

“It’s like your favorite old pair of shoes in the closet,” Scheinman said. “That’s the eyes you should be looking at it through. Yes, it’s been run-down. Yes, it’s been neglected by ownership. But, if you can put on some magical rose-colored glasses, you can see into history at that place. You just need a little imagination.”

During Preakness week each May, trainer D. Wayne Lukas can be found on the back of his pony or holding court from his familiar chair at the far end of the stakes barn. He won his first Preakness with Codex in 1980 and his seventh last year with Seize the Grey, when the cowboy-hatted Lukas was 88 years old.

“I’m going to really miss it,” Lukas said of the Preakness at old Pimlico. “It’s the easiest one. [Bob] Baffert and I talk from time to time about how it’s the most fun one of all the three Triple Crown races. Sharing that stakes barn as we do, Pimlico just makes it awfully easy. It seems like it all falls into place. … They do a beautiful job of taking care of us, top to bottom.”

For others, it’s impossible to divorce wonderful times had at Pimlico from watching the facility crumble under neglectful ownership.

NBC contributor and longtime Sports Illustrated writer Tim Layden has covered dozens of Triple Crown races.

“For me, what has made Pimlico a great American sports venue is the same thing that makes Fenway Park or Notre Dame Stadium or the LA Coliseum great: History happened in this exact place, in a structure that looks almost the same,” Layden wrote in an email. “War Admiral and Seabiscuit ran right past that old grandstand. Secretariat ran right around that turn. To me, that’s incredibly powerful. But that’s also been the problem. Other old, historic venues updated themselves enough to remain viable and charming, and not just old. Pimlico did almost nothing. There’s been a tarp over that grandstand for a while, unfortunately, so now you have to squint to see the history.”

The first races at Pimlico went off in 1870, with the track taking its “Old Hilltop” name from a rise in the infield where patrons and horsemen congregated to take in the happenings. The Maryland Jockey Club removed the hill in 1938 to create better sightlines. The moniker stuck.

Fires wiped out several classic buildings — only a weathervane survived the 1966 blaze that wiped out Pimlico’s Victorian clubhouse — so most of the current structures date to the 1950s and 1960s.

As far back as 1949, Maryland Jockey Club officials floated a plan to abandon Pimlico and consolidate the state’s racing calendar in Laurel. Gov. William Preston Lane Jr. quashed that push, but grumbles over the state of Pimlico would resurface again and again in various forms. Only last year, after The Stronach Group transferred ownership to the state, did elected leaders finally settle on a $500 million plan to tear down the old track and make a new Pimlico (along with a new training facility in Woodbine) the headquarters for the state’s nearly 300-year-old racing industry.

In 1966, the great Sports Illustrated writer Mark Kram penned an essay about his hometown titled, “A Wink at a Homely Girl.”

Horse racing, Pimlico in particular, played a fitting and prominent part in Kram’s semi-affectionate look in the rearview.

“A racing town, then, but you can forget about the charm and tradition, Old Hilltop, and the Preakness, rolling acreage with dancing Thoroughbreds,” he wrote. “That’s for the Establishment, the Valley and Elkridge and all those who think they are a part of it, for the ones in good tweed with the F. Scott Fitzgerald rich-boy faces lined with exquisite dissipation who, forty-eight years old, are known within the circle as Skippy or Junior. Take the charm, the tradition, if you want it, because it’s there; but deal around the other ones, the mobs that bust out of the steel mills, shipyards, and can factories, and try to reach the frozen face behind the window for the last two at Pimlico.”

In other words, even in its relative prime, the track’s virtues tended toward the hardscrabble.

But that was the beauty of Pimlico for those who came to love it, as Scheinman did from the first time he visited when he was a student at American University in 1983.

“The crowds were huge and boisterous and exciting, energy off the charts,” he recalled. “As someone who grew up being taken to Knicks games and to the fights at Madison Square Garden, I knew what electricity felt like, and it felt like that there.”

He remembered later afternoons in the rooftop press box when turf writers would flip over a folding table beside the betting window, dump out a bushel of steamed crabs and feast as they watched video feeds from four other tracks and monitored the live races unfolding below.

“It’s family,” Scheinman said.

Keith Feustle, who will set the morning betting line for the Preakness and who charts races for the industry-leading data company Equibase, used the same word.

“It’s my first home,” he said. “Me coming here at 12, 13 years old with my dad, my uncles, their friends. I’d meet them after work. It’s that Baltimore culture. We’re a blue-collar town.”

He paused to laugh as he watched a fox skitter across the grounds from his rooftop office overlooking the track.

“People come in, they maybe have some not-so-kind words about it, and I guess I can understand it, but it’s part of my fabric, and it’s part of this city’s fabric,” Feustle said. “It’s kind of like my father; he would use duct tape for everything. He’d keep cars going for three, four years longer than they should have, and I loved him for that.”

April Smith, whose organization Friends of Pimlico has fought to preserve the track, liked to say, “There is only one thing wrong with Pimlico; it is not owned by someone who loves it.”

She’s cautiously optimistic for what’s next but also concerned that some of what distinguished the place will be wiped away by the wrecking balls and bulldozers.

“Most of all, I will miss the wooden barns,” Smith said in an email. “They are a step back in time and beloved by trainers like Ken McPeek, D. Wayne Lukas and Bob Baffert. Their intimacy is found at few other tracks.”

Ann Merryman was a 16-year-old student at Garrison Forest when she first galloped horses at Old Hilltop. The Sparks resident would go on to a long, successful career as a trainer based at the Baltimore track.

“Basically, nothing has changed,” she said, thinking back 57 years to her first trips around the oval. “But, to be a quarter of an inch away from Secretariat for a week … I’ve had a lot of great experiences there.”

Merryman has listened to Laurel-based peers bash Pimlico for decades, but to her the racing surface in Baltimore has always been healthier for horses. She’s glad the course itself will endure the planned rebuild.

“I remember [Hall of Fame jockey] Gary Stevens getting off a horse of mine one day and saying, ‘This is the best-kept secret in American racing,’” she said.

She doesn’t cling to the old buildings and has no time for the “froo froo” trimmings — sparkling entryways, parties, luxurious suites — of cutting-edge sports facilities. So that part of the rebuild won’t tug at her heart.

For her, the place where the magic happens, brilliant horses pounding over good dirt at the heart of a city, will be preserved.

“I’m a Pimlico disciple,” Merryman said. “I love the place.”

Even when Pimlico gussied up for its annual showcase on the third Saturday in May, it retained a populist quality, and not just because inebriated infield patrons made sport of racing across the tops of portable toilets.

Trainer Steve Asmussen recalled the warmth emanating from the crowd when he accompanied his great filly, Rachel Alexandra, onto the track before her Preakness victory in 2009.

“I’ve been very fortunate to run races on a high level,” Asmussen said. “But I had never experienced anything like when we walked out of the barn with Rachel. Everybody was on her side.”

There are less savory aspects to Pimlico’s legacy beyond the physical deterioration. Mayor Brandon Scott has talked about how he did not attend a Preakness until a few years ago despite growing up within shouting distance of the track.

Scott and his neighbors did not feel the events going on inside had anything to do with them.

Park Heights activists see a new Pimlico, with funds and space allocated for community and workforce development, as a chance at something better, more inclusive.

“We want to show the world the real and true Baltimore,” the mayor said in December. “That’s not what Preakness has always been. It hasn’t always been a place where we felt welcome. It was held in Northwest Baltimore, but it was very clear that it wasn’t for Northwest Baltimore. But over the past few years … we’ve begun to change that narrative.”

So many people, from neighbors to elected leaders to everyday horsemen in a struggling racing industry, have invested hopes in this reborn Baltimore showpiece. Wrecking balls are expected to swing shortly after Preakness weekend; the Board of Public Works signed off on a $14.3 million demolition contract this month.

But those who love the old place say that, for all that might be gained, something will be lost.

“I don’t worry that will be the case; I know,” Scheinman said. “I’ve spent two-thirds of my life going to this racetrack. It’s going to be extremely hard to say goodbye. Anything they put in isn’t going to replace that. I just hope it’s good.”

Feustle compared it to letting go of a childhood blanket.

“Just that innate security,” he said. “Pimlico is kind of like the city. It has that uniqueness to it. If you’re not from here, you may not appreciate it.”