The pueblo secured $4 million in state legislative capital outlay this year and $8 million last year to help move forward with new plans for the 320-acre site at 27475 W. Frontage Road just off Interstate 25.

Pueblo officials did not respond to inquiries last week about the project, though a preliminary development plan obtained by The New Mexican indicates a hotel and various types of housing could be in the works, as well as commercial space.

Martinez, a former horse trainer, now 83, is among many longtime patrons who lament The Downs at Santa Fe’s demise and now its disappearance.

“We had some really, really good times at The Downs,” Martinez said. “We really, really miss it. It just gets into your blood.”

The towering and long-lonely grandstand at The Downs was a landmark that loomed off I-25 since the early 1970s. Suddenly, almost overnight, it is gone, stirring memories for locals, some of whom stopped in recent weeks to take photographs of the stadium buckling under the pressure of excavators.

It served for a couple of decades as a fixture of entertainment and gambling during its heyday in Northern New Mexico until it closed in the late 1990s, then lay mostly dormant for more than 25 years.

As a music venue, The Downs drew top-dollar musicians, including the Grateful Dead — with fans recalling legendary performances there in 1982 and ’83 — and country star Roger Miller, known for his 1965 hit “King of the Road.”

Plans to revive horse racing at The Downs in the 2000s never took hold, though Pojoaque Pueblo made preparations, smoothing out a massive pile of manure that had angered neighbors and restricted use of the property.

Workmen began screening trash out of the pile in 2008 and spreading manure 4 to 5 inches thick across a 40-acre parcel on the property. The manure was tilled into the soil and native grasses were planted over it.

The site has since hosted soccer matches, flea markets, movie nights, music shows — one festival that epically fizzled — and a fall fest with pumpkin carving and a costume parade. Some 800 people gathered for the Ultimate Gladiator Dash, an extreme sports challenge, in 2014, the same year an equestrian event was staged there — but not for racing. Horses and riders tested their skills in dressage, show jumping and cross-country jumping competitions.

Mostly, The Downs has been empty.

Members of the horse racing industry in New Mexico cite a suite of reasons why operating venues like The Downs has proved challenging amid increasingly high competition for the “gambling dollar” in the Land of Enchantment.

The racing industry has struggled nationally in recent decades amid what is generally perceived as a dip in interest; slot machines and gambling are keeping many racetracks — which double as “racinos” — afloat.

These days, Martinez and his wife travel to The Downs Racetrack & Casino at Expo New Mexico in Albuquerque to play the horses there, but the experience isn’t the same as what they remember decades ago at their hometown track: Times have changed, and they no longer see people they know.

J.J. Gonzales, another Northern New Mexican involved in the industry who fondly recalls The Downs at Santa Fe, enjoyed a storied career in the sport, winning the All American Futurity — considered to be quarter horse racing’s biggest event — at Ruidoso Downs Racetrack & Casino in 2003.

Once a boy with a talent, he became a licensed jockey at age 16, and he credits Santa Fe with launching his career in the 1990s.

“I won my first race there, and that’s always a sentimental deal right there,” said Gonzales, a native of the community of Sena in San Miguel County. “That sticks to you pretty hard.”

Don Cook, now president of racing at The Downs Racetrack & Casino in Albuquerque, worked at the local Downs from 1988 until it closed in the 1990s. While in Santa Fe, he did about everything there is to do at a track: He was a clocker, a placing judge, a stall superintendent, a director of security.

It’s a shame the track closed because it had ample potential and upside, he said.

“It was nicknamed the Saratoga of the West,” Cook said, referring to the famed racetrack in New York state.

“It had a nice, beautiful grass infield, a great view of the mountains. It was a shame it got closed down, but things happen.”

Racetrack anticipation burned hot in Santa Fe in 1971. On opening day in June, a crowd of 11,000 people turned out at the $5.5 million, 1-mile oval track, creating traffic jams.

Stabling facilities were unable to accommodate the volume of horses streaming into Santa Fe, so ran the reports in late May that year.

Ismael “Izzy” Trejo, executive director of the New Mexico Racing Commission, grew up around the track; his father was a horse trainer. He recalled the feeling of euphoria as a child when jockeys gave him their goggles following races.

But the racetrack, run by a company called Santa Fe Racing, began to experience financial difficulties even in its early years — the 1976 racing season was in doubt for a time when debts exceeded $3.5 million, according to reports in The Santa Fe New Mexican.

The Pueblo of Pojoaque acquired the property in the mid-1990s and had big plans to continue horse racing. With events such as the Indian Nations Futurity Cup under the pueblo’s ownership, there was every indication the struggling racetrack could still become a significant place for the sport in the Southwest, Trejo said.

In 1997, track officials hoped the Indian Nations Futurity Cup would shower national prestige on Santa Fe, The New Mexican reported. A Pojoaque Pueblo official told a reporter at the time the goal was for the race to put The Downs at Santa Fe back on the map, with an estimated purse of up to $600,000.

“But I think they realized it’s hard to run a racetrack,” Trejo said. “It’s costly. You have to have a lot of employees — assistant starters, jockey valets, racing office staff, stewards, concessionaires, track maintenance people, mutual tellers. You have a whole army.”

The pueblo closed the track in the late ’90s after a few years of ownership, citing millions of dollars in losses.

Cook said, in his opinion, the closure of The Downs at Santa Fe had more to do with a dispute over the number of race days than anything else — with the racers wanting more.

“It was actually closed down over the amount of races the horsemen wanted to run and the racetrack wanted to recall. From what I can recall, it was over one day,” Cook said. “In my opinion, that track would still be there if there wasn’t a fight over a race day.”

While the racetrack had its ups and downs in its two decades of operation, it allowed trainers and jockeys in the area to get a strong start on their careers.

Two prominent photographs of J.J. Gonzales appeared side by side in The New Mexican in 1993. Then 16, the young jockey was already turning heads in the sport.

One image shows him riding a quarter horse named Sapello Kid at The Downs at Santa Fe. In the other, he is shown stroking another fleet-footed equine in the barns where his father, James Gonzales Sr., was a trainer.

Ten years later, he would win the All American Futurity in Ruidoso.

About a year after he retired as a jockey in 2008, he began training horses. Now Gonzales and his sons operate a successful stable based in El Paso, known as the Gonzales Racing Stable, and compete in races around the Southwest, including in Oklahoma City and Dallas.

The Downs in the City Different was where many horsemen, especially those from the region, made their name.

“It started right there in Santa Fe,” Gonzales said. “For me, that was a big part of my life growing up.”

Meanwhile, the rise of tribal gambling operations in the state in the 1990s created difficulties for New Mexico’s horse racing industry. In 1995, then-Gov. Gary Johnson began signing compacts with various pueblos and tribes, allowing them to open casinos.

When Johnson signed those compacts, “he signed a death knell for racing in this state,” Ken Newton, the former Downs at Santa Fe owner, once told The New Mexican. “Racing can’t compete, even with video slots, against full-bore casino gaming,” he said at the time.

Newton, who died in 2015, sold his interest in Santa Fe Racing to the six other stockholders in 1996; later that year, they sold it to Pojoaque Pueblo.

The casinos would continue to pose challenges for the horse racing industry, which fought for two years for a 1997 law allowing slot machines at up to six racetracks in the state.

Casino operations at five tracks — now known as racinos — help subsidize the racing, Trejo noted.

“The competition for the gambling dollar has gotten fierce,” he said.

There were attempts to get a racino license for the track in Santa Fe.

Pojoaque Pueblo sought in 2008 to convince the Racing Commission The Downs at Santa Fe would be the best place to locate what was expected to be the state’s sixth and final racino for at least the next 33 years.

It was one of three in the running.

However, an operator in Raton won the license based on a little-known statute designed to regulate competition between neighboring racetracks — The Downs at Santa Fe was too close, within 80 miles, of the Albuquerque track.

The Racing Commission later revoked the Raton license after the project collapsed following repeated construction delays and persistent questions about its financing, The New Mexican reported in 2018, when the Racing Commission was again considering issuing a sixth racino license. The process faced delays, and a new license was never issued.

A former Pojoaque Pueblo governor had told The New Mexican in 2008 The Downs at Santa Fe was not profitable without slot machine revenue to subsidize the horse racing operation.

Supporting this statement, a 2008 economic impact study of southeastern New Mexico’s Zia Park Racetrack, which opened in 2005 in Hobbs, found casino revenues were the primary source of income for racetracks in the state.

Gamblers’ slot machine losses enrich purses in horse races, according to the study, conducted by the New Mexico Racing Commission.

The horse racing industry relies heavily on a pari-mutuel system, which combines bets from racetracks and casinos. It has been in place in New Mexico for more than a quarter-century and has become a significant source of revenue.

New Mexico commercial casinos, or racinos, face considerable competition from the state’s 21 tribal casinos, according to the American Gaming Association, with tribal casinos in the state generating $835 million in casino gaming revenue in fiscal year 2023, an increase of 4.6% from 2022.

“Unlike the state’s racinos, tribal casinos are permitted to offer table games and sports betting in addition to electronic gaming devices,” states a 2024 report from the association about New Mexico.

Cook, who noted there are few horse tracks in the nation operating without slot machines, highlighted some of the competition in the Albuquerque metropolitan area when it comes to gambling. He said The Downs there competes with an array of casinos on tribal land within a half-hour drive, including Sandia Casino and Isleta Casino.

“There are so many other forms of gambling now that were not around in the ’70s and ’80s,” Cook said.

He thinks only a couple of racetracks in the state would be able to survive without casinos attached — the Ruidoso Downs and The Downs Racetrack & Casino in Albuquerque.

The state has three other racinos aside from those in Ruidoso and Albuquerque: Zia Park Casino Hotel & Racetrack in Hobbs, Sunland Park Racetrack & Casino and Sunray Park & Casino in Farmington.

Trejo said costs associated with the sport have jumped.

“They used to call it the sport of kings, and the amount of cost that the racetracks and the horsemen have to endure just to enjoy the entertainment of horse racing, it’s very expensive now,” Trejo said.

“It’s going full circle to where the common man is having difficulty sustaining in this industry,” he added, “and it’s becoming the sport of kings again — only the wealthy can prevail.”