New York National Speedway (Center Moriches, L.I.)

Gilbert Kohn spent $800,000 building this strip, which opened March 20, 1966. It ran south to north through what’s now the Greenwood Village active adult community, and little remains except the staging area. The first big race, on April 17, 1966, was a best-of-three match between Don Prudhomme and Don Garlits. Opening day in 1967 drew 15,000 spectators and 1,320 entries. The track was AHRA sanctioned from the start.

One fan remembered being dropped off by his mother with a friend on Sunday mornings in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Admission was $3.75, or $6 for the AHRA Springnationals in May. Most weekends featured funny car match races advertised heavily on the big radio stations. He recalled the souvenir “Goody Booth,” bad hot dogs and fries, push-started rails, and seeing Bruce Larson set a national low ET of 7.15 in his ‘67 Chevelle. Wheelstanders “Hemi Under Glass” and “‘Lil Red Wagon” would turn around at the end and run back toward the line on their back wheels, until another wheelstander lost control doing it a few years later and crashed through a fence behind the starting line, killing at least one spectator. He also remembered muscle cars heading down Sunrise Highway with slicks in the back seat, and making a run in his cousin’s ‘67 396 Chevelle at 16, with no license and nobody checking.

On August 18, 1968, before 12,000 people at a big AHRA race, an exhibition pickup crashed through a guardrail and two fences into the crowd, injuring about thirteen people, among them a track official. One victim lost his legs. In the early 1970s Kohn began saying the track belonged to the United Hot Rod Association, a group he had made up himself. He stopped running it at the very end of the 1970s and leased it to a man who ran it briefly under NHRA sanction.