Belmont Stakes

One of the greatest things about Manhattan is the endless variety of dining options. I could live here a lifetime and it still would be impossible to try all the great restaurants in the City. Unfortunately my tight summer budget means that I’m currently sampling the best pizza parlors and hole-in-the-wall ethnic places rather than the city’s finest French restaurants or steakhouses, but it’s still easy to get filled up on amazing food from a different place each night. Tuesday night I ate at New York Burger Co., which is widely acclaimed for having some of the best burgers in New York. Wednesday I sampled a couple places in the Lower East Side – Rosario’s Pizza and the Zagat-rated Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery. Thursday was boiled seafood dumplings at Mandoo Bar in Korea Town, and Friday was authentic thin-crust pizza at an Italian place called Angelo’s.

Monday and Saturday’s meals were less notable… brownies and ice cream for FHE, and a Whopper at Burger King.

Whenever I heard the term ‘Broadway’ while growing up, the first image that popped into my head was a giant black billboard with a gleaming white mask and the words, ‘Phantom of the Opera’. ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and ‘Broadway’ were synonymous terms as far as I was concerned, and any visit to Broadway would most definitely have to include a visit to ‘Phantom of the Opera’. My impression of Broadway has changed considerably over the years, but I still had never seen New York’s most popular and longest-running show ever. Friday night I met up with a friend of mine from the MBA program and headed to the ‘Majestic Theatre’ on 44th Street to finally see ‘Phantom of the Opera’ for the first time.

Twenty-six bucks got us standing-room tickets at the back of the first level. It wasn’t quite the experience of sitting on the third row at ‘Wicked’ or the second row at ‘In the Heights’, but most Broadway shows are impressive regardless of where you are sitting (or standing), and that was definitely the case with ‘Phantom’. I enjoyed the special effects of the show, including the rickety chandelier that swung wildly above the crowd before coming crashing down to the stage, the seemingly instantaneous movement of the actors to different parts of the set, and the towering flaming candlesticks that rose silently from fog covering the ground below. The plot and the acting were great, but surprisingly I had no sympathy for the Phantom. Sure, it’s a little disheartening that his face is disfigured, he has no friends, and the girl of his dreams runs off with another man; but somehow I don’t see how terrorizing an opera house is going to solve any of his problems… Maybe I’m just not a sophisticated theatre-watcher and if I saw the show a few more times I’d understand.

One of the other interns at American Express sent out an e-mail this week inviting everyone to go to the ‘Belmont Stakes’ on Long Island. I’ve never really thought to go to a horse-race before, but it sounded fun so I decided to go for it. To me the entire experience was part of the event, from riding the Long Island Rail Road past Brooklyn to Belmont Park, to watching the hoards of people ecstatic about the race, to seeing the jockeys and horses themselves on the track. Our whole group ended up being Ashley (the girl who invited everyone), her fiancé John, myself, and my friend Allison who’s interning at Jet Blue this summer. We claimed a spot at the front of the grandstand right by the track and laid a blanket down on the ground for a picnic. Lunch was artisan bread with thinly-sliced peppered sausage, cambembert cheese, cranberry-apple chutney, and kalamata olives. As we ate I did a little people watching, trying to spot nostalgic fans dressed in seersucker suits or wide-brimmed floppy hats for the race. Between the exotic food, the finely-dressed fans, and the horse-race itself, I felt like I had been transplanted into a 1920’s-era novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The occasional sighting of rowdy drunken college kids, or men in their fifties who haven’t yet realized that they’re much too old to be strutting around with their shirts off, brought me back down to earth though.

Ten preliminary races kept a crowd of 50,000 entertained throughout the day until the climax of the event – the ‘Belmont Stakes’ race itself – a once annual running of the finest horses in America and one of three races that constitute the Triple Crown (the other two being Preakness and The Kentucky Derby). Eleven jockeys paraded their horses past the crowd in a pre-race ‘prance’; a practice before each race that gives bettors the opportunity to get a good look at the horses they plan to make wagers on. My favorite horses included ‘Mine That Bird’, a 50-1 underdog at Preakness who came from behind to secure an incredible victory, and ‘Luv Guv’, a horse named for Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York and self-proclaimed moral stronghold who later resigned after being caught with a prostitute. The intensity of the crowd grew as the horses were released from the gate, and towards the end of the race the grandstand erupted when Mine that Bird took the lead (presumably because so many people had placed bets on the horse). As the group of horses rushed directly in front of me a different horse, ‘Summer Bird’, took the lead. Summer Bird finished first, a horse named ‘Dunkirk’, was second, and ‘Mine that Bird’ finished out the top three. The excitement of the crowd collapsed at the results, a reflection of millions of dollars likely lost by bettors, and Summer Bird suddenly was the most hated horse on the track. I wondered to myself if fewer people picked Summer Bird to win because of the commentary on him in the Belmont Stakes program, “This horse’s biggest weakness is that it exhibits a lack of class.”