City Park Race Track in New Orleans, Louisiana, opened for business on February 11, 1905, with six races carded. The track, which was operated by the New Orleans Jockey Club, spared no expense. City Park was considered by many as being beautiful and even magnificent with a luxurious dining room, spacious café, lavatories, change rooms, and chairs for seating in the grandstand instead of wooden benches.

A large crowd, though not as large as expected, attended the races that day, its size no doubt affected by a heavy downpour that began around midnight Friday, and lasted well past the day’s final race.  The racing surface was a quagmire, and the running times for each race were unbelievably slow with the feature race, a one-mile handicap for a purse of $1,000 taking 1:54 3/5 for the winner, a four-year-old colt named Garnish, to complete.

In 1908, after a vicious fight that saw some arrested for defying the law, City Park Race Track closed for good as gambling was banned at all race tracks in Louisiana in accordance with the Locke Bill anti-race track gambling law, a ban that would last seven long years.

The feature race on the final day of the 61-day meeting on March 28, 1908, was the fourth running of the Lyric Handicap, at a mile and one-half. It was won by Old Honesty, a four-year-old son of Previous, who negotiated the distance in a track record 2:33. Jockey Joe Notter, who would win the 1915 Kentucky Derby aboard the marvelous filly Regret, and ride many great horses including Whisk Broom II, Colon, Fair Play, Peter Pan, and Maskette, was the leading jockey. Later that year, Notter won the Belmont Stakes with the undefeated Colon, and finished the year with 249 victories, third best, and set an earnings record for jockeys when his mounts won a total of $464,322.