San Diego History · Del Mar
The road is named for a man who never owned a share of the place.
Bing Crosby and Oliver Hardy incorporated it in 1936. Jimmy Durante just showed up every summer. All records sourced and cited.
Bing Crosby and Oliver Hardy incorporated it in 1936. Jimmy Durante just showed up every summer. All records sourced and cited.
The road into the Del Mar Fairgrounds is Jimmy Durante Boulevard. The turf course inside is the Jimmy Durante Turf Course. The state of California lists the property's official address as 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd.
Jimmy Durante never owned a share of the place.
He was a customer. A very loud one, at the track most summers, betting hard and doing unpaid comedy at Bing Crosby's press parties. The men who actually incorporated the racetrack in 1936 have one hall, one gate and one stakes race between them. The fan got the road.
That is not even the strangest thing here. The ground the track sits on was a tidal lagoon until somebody filled it in. The most famous race ever run on it ended with two jockeys throwing hands at each other down the stretch and the state racing board convening an emergency session the next morning. And the Spanish mission grandstand everybody remembers has not existed since 1991.
The San Diego County Fair is older than the fairgrounds by 56 years. It started in 1880 in National City and spent decades without a permanent site.
The site it eventually got was not dry land. The California Coastal Commission, reviewing the property in 2017, put it plainly: "Virtually the entire Fairgrounds property was created by filling tidelands back in the 1930's." The racetrack, the barns, the parking, the grandstand. All of it sits on fill dumped into the mouth of the San Dieguito River, bounded by Stevens Creek to the north and west and the river to the south.
The owner then and now is the 22nd District Agricultural Association, which is not a county body and not a private club. It is an agency of the State of California, run by a nine member board appointed by the governor.
On May 6, 1936, William Quigley and Bing Crosby filed articles of incorporation for the Del Mar Turf Club with the California Secretary of State. The San Diego Union reported it the next morning and reported the officers the morning after that.
The board read like a guest list.
Bing Crosby, president. His brother Bob Crosby, vice president. Pat O'Brien and Oliver Hardy as officers. Joe E. Brown and Gary Cooper on the executive committee.
The Turf Club was not built to make Crosby a racing magnate. It existed to solve a money problem. The Agricultural Association had a Works Progress Administration application in and could not raise the sponsor's share the federal program required. Leasing race dates to a private turf association was how the state agency covered its end. Hollywood money got the fairgrounds built; the fairgrounds got Hollywood a racetrack.
The architects were Herbert Louis Jackson and Samuel Wood Hamill, a partnership that lasted two years. The City of San Diego's own Historical Resources Board still lists the Del Mar fairgrounds and racetrack among their work. They built it Spanish Colonial Revival, lifting detailing from three missions, and patterned the clubhouse on the Hotel Iturbide in Mexico City, down to the worm eaten oak furniture.
The track opened July 3, 1937. The Associated Press moved a story that afternoon under the headline "Crosby's Track, Del Mar, Opens," and the lead was not about horses: "Hollywood took the day off and moved to Del Mar."
Fred Astaire came. So did Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, Martha Raye, Bob Burns, Burns and Allen, and, in the clubhouse, Oliver Hardy. Crosby went on NBC at 5:45 with sportscaster Clem McCarthy to describe his own opening day to the country.
There is a story, repeated everywhere, that Crosby personally took tickets at the gate that morning.
We are not printing it, because nobody can show it. The track's own history says only that Crosby was there to greet the first fan through the gate. The most detailed version traces to one attendee's recollection published in 2003, 66 years after the fact. The AP story from the day itself is a long celebrity roll call and never mentions it. Crosby was at the gate. Whether he tore a ticket is a thing people started saying later.
On August 12, 1938, Seabiscuit ran a match race at Del Mar against a horse named Ligaroti. Twenty five thousand dollars, winner take all, and no betting allowed on it at all.
The ownership is the part people forget. Ligaroti belonged to Binglin Stable, the partnership of Bing Crosby and Lin Howard. Seabiscuit belonged to Charles S. Howard, who was Lin Howard's father. Crosby's horse against his partner's dad's horse, at Crosby's track. Lin Howard bet his father five thousand dollars against fifteen thousand on the result. Crosby and Pat O'Brien broadcast their radio show from the grandstand roof, and Crosby appointed Shirley Temple race director.
Seabiscuit won. George Woolf rode him at 130 pounds; Noel Richardson rode Ligaroti at 115.
Then it got ugly. The International News Service wire the next day: the win came "by inches," and "the stewards announced they were inquiring into the running of the race." Richardson had claimed a foul and been denied. In the jockeys' room he accused Woolf of grabbing his horse's bridle in the stretch. Both riders were told to accept no mounts the following day and to report to the stewards in the morning.
The California Horse Racing Board, a state agency, met in extraordinary session on August 13 over what United Press called "alleged rodeo tactics that most spectators missed in the heat of the neck and neck battle."
The result stood. It has stood ever since.
The track went dark for three seasons during the war. The Marines trained on the grounds first, and then the place was turned over to manufacturing parts for B-17 bombers.
It came back on the day Japan surrendered. President Truman declared a national holiday for August 15, 1945, and 20,324 people came to Del Mar and bet it like they meant it.
The Bing Crosby Handicap was first run in 1946 and ended in a dead heat. It is still on the calendar, now a Grade 1.
The turf course opened in 1960 and was named for Durante, who had been showing up every summer since the 1950s and arranging his own bookings around the meet. The track's media director describes him schmoozing visiting stars and betting "with both fists." His party trick was demolishing a rigged piano. One year he arrived without it, borrowed an upright from the Clubhouse, and threw the pieces over the railing twenty five feet to the ground.
He died January 29, 1980, at 86.
And in 1991, after the last race on September 11, a wrecking ball took the 1937 grandstand down. The Spanish Colonial building in all the old photographs is gone. What replaced it, an eighty million dollar structure, was dedicated by Governor Pete Wilson in 1993. If you have stood at Del Mar, you have not stood in Crosby's grandstand.
Walk the property and the founders are on the buildings. O'Brien Hall is the largest exhibit building on the grounds, and the main fair entrance is the O'Brien Gate. There is a Bing Crosby Hall.
The stakes races are a different matter, and this is worth knowing before you repeat any of it. In September 2014 the track announced it was renaming several races "to honor show business stars from the past who had roots at the shore oval." The Bob Hope, Desi Arnaz, Cecil B. DeMille, Betty Grable and Jimmy Durante stakes all date from that announcement. They are not old Del Mar races. They are Hollywood Park races that Del Mar inherited when Hollywood Park closed at the end of 2013 and then gave new names. The Jimmy Durante Stakes was the Miesque Stakes and it was first run at Hollywood Park in 1990.
The program is already reversing. In 2025 the Cary Grant Stakes, run eleven times, was renamed for a racehorse.
One more correction, because the map invites it. There is a Bing Crosby Boulevard in San Diego County. It is not in Del Mar. It runs through the Crosby Estate development off Del Dios Highway, about ten miles inland, in a golf community that took his name long after he died. Crosby's real inland footprint is in Rancho Santa Fe, where the first Bing Crosby Pro-Am was played in 1937. Sam Snead won it and the check was five hundred dollars. It did not move to Pebble Beach until 1947.
On November 6, 1949, the one mile dirt oval was not running horses. It was running cars, a hundred mile American Automobile Association championship race, with 22,000 people in the stands.
Rex Mays was a two time national champion. On the 13th lap he was second, coming around the south turn, when his car tangled with another and went over. The Associated Press reported what the crowd saw: Mays "was thrown from the speeding machine as it turned over and over and crashed through the infield rail," his body thrown into the middle of the track, and then struck again by another car.
The deputy coroner, Dave Bone, gave the AP one sentence. "He was all crushed up. He was undoubtedly killed on the spot."
They cleared the track and finished the race. Jim Davies won it in one hour, ten minutes and change. Eleven of the seventeen starters took the checkered flag.
Del Mar is a small city with a state agency, a racetrack and a fairground sitting on filled tideland at the mouth of a river in the middle of it. That is the single largest fact about living there and it is not a market condition, it is a permanent one. It sets the traffic pattern, the seasonal rhythm, the noise calendar, the lagoon restoration politics and the coastal permitting that comes with anything built near it.
A buyer here is not buying near a racetrack. They are buying near a state institution that happens to run horses seven weeks a year.
Current pricing, inventory and days on market for Del Mar are in the Del Mar market report, updated monthly from closed MLS sales, and the surrounding coastal cities are in North County Coastal.
Bing Crosby and the tickets. No contemporaneous record shows Crosby taking or tearing tickets on opening day. The track's own history says he greeted the first fan. We have printed that and nothing more.
The winning margin in 1938. The track says a nose. The 1938 wire said inches. The San Diego History Center's journal says a length. The document that would settle it is the official Daily Racing Form chart for that day, and the digitized run of that paper is missing the summer of 1938. We have not printed a margin.
The date Rex Mays died. The International Motorsports Hall of Fame gives November 11, 1949. The Associated Press dispatch is datelined November 7 and says "yesterday," and contemporaneous reports in other papers run November 7 and 8. We have printed November 6 and cited the wire.
Whether Durante lived here. Sources split between calling him a resident and calling him a summer regular. We have printed the summer regular version, which is the one the track itself supports.
More San Diego history: stories from around the county, one place at a time.