Billy, 68, who has operated the RRR Alteration Center since 1971, thinks a shopping complex with some housing would make sense for the vast parcel and perhaps draw shoppers from other neighborhoods.
Marcus Melvin, the 41-year-old owner of Cinderella Shoes on Park Heights Avenue, shares Billy's vision as long as it yields decent jobs for neighborhood residents. A Wal-Mart might make sense, he said.
"If the racetrack could provide long-term employment for this community, I'm all for it," said Melvin, a former soldier who retains his military bearing. But he doubts it's possible, in which case it would be "time to move on" and replace the track.
When the Klozes moved to Merville Avenue in 1972, horses ran half the year at Pimlico and bettors thronged the track. No longer. This year, Pimlico is down to just 20 racing days. They now see the track as a benign, quiet giant that shudders to life for Preakness and the occasional concert.
On Preakness Day, they set out trash cans, let people use their bathroom and shoo scammers who try to charge visitors $20 to park on a public street. (Vicki Kloze still bristles, though, when she recalls how somebody once drove across their lawn after being blocked in. "Almost killed one of my kids," she said.)
They're not at all rooting for the track to go under, though they would not greatly lament the loss. In its place, they would prefer to see light industrial or an office campus or an expanded Sinai Hospital. They would oppose shopping because they believe it would sputter, an opinion some in Park Heights share. No housing either, given the oversupply of empty homes in the area.
"A lot of people are scared because they don't know what it's going to be," Vicki Kloze, a retired teacher's aide and former stay-at-home mother, said in the couple's verdant garden, with its fountain, pond and vegetable plot. "I think because of the economy, nothing is going to happen. We're just going to go on like this."
Her 69-year-old husband, a retired antiques dealer, concurred. "That's probably the best guess," he said. "Nothing is going to happen."
