History
Maywood Park was originally the home of Cook County Fairgrounds, where in 1932 and during Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition years of 1933 and 1934, non-wagering harness racing purse programs were held.
Maywood has conducted race meets with wagering since 1946, the longest in the state's standardbred history.
In June 1947 the first full harness race program to be televised anywhere in the country took place at Maywood Park, and the opening night of the 1957 spring meet was televised by NBC on The Tonight Show.
In 1979, boxing champion Muhammad Ali won a seven-furlong exhibition race, a fundraising event to benefit Provident Hospital of Chicago.
In 1984 Maywood Park became the first Chicago-area track to host a Breeders Crown race. The Two-Year-Old Filly Pace Final carried a $550,000 prize, the largest purse ever offered at a Chicago area Standardbred track.
Maywood Park has been the scene of numerous world records, including She's A Great Lady's 1:51.2 mile in 1995, a record that still stands for a three-year-old filly pacer on a half-mile track.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)