Wild, weird and historic: The Kentucky Derby infield has served as a sign of the times

At one point the infield at Churchill Downs was home to a potato crop and at another, it was a military camp.

Historic photos from the 1950s also show hundreds of priests and ornate crosses in the grassy center of Churchill Downs, the storied racetrack in Louisville where the Kentucky Derby runs each year.

This, for the record, is the same seemingly lawless space that turns into Kentucky’s own equivalent of Bourbon Street in New Orleans or the Las Vegas Strip for two days each year. You can argue that life in the infield is even more about the debauchery on Kentucky Derby Day than it is about the race itself. 

Since counter-culture boomed in the 60s and 70s, the grass in the center of the racetrack has morphed into an often obscure and unruly place. Derbygoers have raced atop rows of Porta-Potties. Streaking is marginally accepted and occasionally encouraged by the crowd. You never know who you'll meet out there, either. Some people choose to wear costumes, and so could find yourself sharing a beer with characters like Santa Claus and Gumby.

In 1970 Hunter S. Thompson called the whole thing "decadent and depraved" in his iconic essay that ran in Scanlan's Monthly that June. 

The infield very much has a reputation, but like race day itself, this grassy hub of debauchery at the Kentucky Derby is a reflection of the history of that time.

And genuinely, we’ve lived through quite a bit of history in the past year or so.

Ahead of the 147th running of the Kentucky Derby on May 1, I sat down with Jessica Whitehead of the Kentucky Derby Museum to take a deeper look at what the infield has meant to the track and the race over the years.

When I first started thinking about this column in January — yes, we plan a lot of our Kentucky Derby coverage months in advance of the fastest two minutes in sports — it was because Churchill Downs had said that despite the pandemic, it would welcome a limited number of socially distant fans the first weekend in May but we’d be going without an infield for the second year in a row.

That’s not the case now.

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The track announced in late March that it would sell reserved boxed seating in the infield. Honestly, that seemed wilder than not having it at all. Would there even be Porta-Potties to race atop in “reserved box seating?”

Churchill Downs doubled down on its promise to have fans at the race when in early April it said that a limited amount of general admission tickets would also be available for the infield. Now, roughly 15,000 fans could spread out over that 22-acre grassy area during the first Saturday in May.

That's a fraction of the 60,000 people who crammed in during the infield's record year in 2015, and honestly, the more I thought about it, the harder it was to picture what it might look like. Mudwrestling tends to be a staple in the infield on rainy Kentucky Derby days. Would people be slinging mud and fighting with strangers with masks on? Would anyone be daring enough to body surf across a crowd of strangers when we still haven't reached herd immunity with the COVID-19 pandemic? 

Whitehead reminded me, though, that no matter how different it looked, that grassy land and the people who fill it would still have a story to tell about 2021.

After all, the infield and its visitors have told 146 years of stories before.

Since many people in the infield are tucked away without a true view of the track, they’re there to celebrate the greatest two minutes in sports, but not necessarily see it. Many rely on the $12 million, 4K ultra-high-definition video "Big Board" that Churchill Downs installed in 2014 to watch the race. Up until it was installed, thousands of people would turn out for Derby Day but never actually see a horse from the infield. 

“They’re there because of the race but they’re not there for the race,” Whitehead explained. “It’s more like an anthropological study.”

They’re there to be part of the spectacle itself.

It wasn’t always that way, though.

We started our conversation and deep-dive into the history of the infield at the beginning. The infield has welcomed guests since the first Kentucky Derby in 1875. The grassy space in its inception was called the centerfield. 

The earliest photos of the infield appear surprisingly … lazy.

It’s certainly a more casual environment than the full fashion and pageantry you’d see from the first year of photos in the stands. Gentlemen roll up their sleeves and women lounge in the grass more like they’re attending a picnic than a sporting event. 

In a normal, non-pandemic year, the infield holds more people than the population of Bowling Green, Kentucky. In these photos of simpler times, the crowd is much more manageable and scattered among a beautifully landscaped area. There are a few thousand people there, and you can actually see photos of the races happening instead of the seemingly endless sea of bodies we know today. 

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When Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr. built Churchill Downs in the late 19th century, he wanted it to be a picturesque place where the thoroughbred owners from eastern states would want to bring their prize racing champions, Whitehead explained to me. 

He had this elevated idea of Kentucky, which was revolutionary for a place that still felt very much like the frontier in 1875. 

So the heavily landscaped centerfield served as a driving park for the chariot racing and steeplechases that were common in that period.

In 1910, the infield saw a bit of aviation history. Renowned aviator Glenn Curtiss transported all the pieces of an airplane to Kentucky via freight train and actually assembled the airplane at the track. The first recorded flight in Kentucky was actually Curtiss' lap around the racetrack. 

Eight years later during the spring of 1918 — the same year as that Spanish Flu we've all become so educated on since the pandemic hit last March — the country was fighting World War I and experiencing a potato shortage. So Churchill Downs planted a potato crop in the infield, and 1,000 bushels were harvested and auctioned off. The money went to the Red Cross.

Fast forward to 1937 and structurally that's when the tunnels that go under the infield and help shuttle people to the frontside of Churchill Downs were installed, and that garden-like space begins to look more like the open area we recognize today. 

It's also one of the rare occasions when Kentucky Derby officials had talked about canceling the race altogether. That was the year of the worst Ohio River flood in history. Water covered 60% of the city, and it racked up more than $1 billion in modern dollars worth of damage. 

The track was so saturated, it could have been dangerous for horses to run. There are even photos of boats floating in front of the main entrance.

But the governor at the time gave a morale-boosting speech and insisted the city needed the Kentucky Derby at this hard moment in history. The community kicked into high gear to prepare the track and Louisville for the storied race. 

The week of the 1937 Kentucky Derby, a dynamic American flag flew over the infield, and it's one of the major artifacts that represent the infield that the museum has in its collection. 

"It’s a really nice memorial of that moment in Louisville history that was so scary for so many people," Whitehead said. 

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Five years later, during World War II, the infield actually served as overflow housing for soldiers from Fort Knox and Bowman Field during the 1942 Fall Meet. Photos from that period show that from the stands you could see the tents below. They called it "Camp Winn" in honor of then Churchill Downs president Col. Matt J. Winn. 

The infield even operated as a place of worship in the 1950s when the Holy Name Society used the space for its Corpus Christi celebration in June. Photos show thousands of priests and large ornate crosses in the infield. They blessed the Eucharist on the same land where the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s would streak and smoke just a decade or so later. 

That's really where the infield as we know it today took its form. Up until then, the whole experience felt very straight-laced, Whitehead told me. 

"It really became a place where all kinds met and people from all political views and views on life," Whitehead said of the 60s and 70s. "That’s where you start seeing the partying, and the exhibitionism, and people who are just really trying to have a good time and let loose in a way that culture wouldn’t have allowed them before." 

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So I went looking through our own archives, and genuinely, our Courier Journal photos tell the infield's most recent history better than even Whitehead could have done. 

In 1978, The Courier Journal published a photo of a group of people who tried for two hours to get a woman, any woman, to take off her shirt. It took $50 to get a volunteer, but they finally talked a woman into flashing the crowd. 

One photo from two years earlier shows a human pyramid unlike any I've seen before. Picture about 10 men on the bottom, supporting two more layers in a circle, forming almost a mountain-like structure with 30 or so people. 

Another from 1980 shows a bare-chested man walking around in nothing but a ballcap and a whiskey barrel. 

In 1990, one of the rainier Kentucky Derby Day's on record, our archives show three fans making the most of the downpour by turning the soggy ground into a mud-wrestling arena.

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The infield's reflections of history aren't always as overt as building a military camp or the aftermath of a flood, either. There's an iconic, very telling photo of a racegoer who was wearing a rubber Richard Nixon mask as part of his get-up, Whitehead recalled from her research. The year before, Nixon had attended the race as president, and the mood of the country following the impeachment could be summed up in that rubber mockery. 

Those small but very telling details add to that anthropological study she'd mentioned when we started our conversation. 

And with that in mind, she's been thinking a lot about what the images and stories of our most recent races will say, too. 

It's been a strange decade for the Derby, even before the pandemic hit, Whitehead reminded me. The 2010s saw two Triple Crown winners in 2015 with American Pharoah and then again in 2018 with Justify. Of course, there was the Maximum Security and Country House disqualification debacle of 2019. 

In 2020, the race ran without fans in the stands, and the infield sat deserted and forgotten. Those photos will be just as telling about the pandemic as the images of Camp Winn and the old potato fields. 

Whitehead expects 2021 will be a transitional year of sorts.  It'll be a year of reserved seating in Louisville's version of New Orleans Bourbon Street and face masks that are color-coordinated with hats. 

I expect it'll be a year without Porta-Potti races and human pyramids, too. 

I'm sure it'll have its own story, whatever it may be. 

And 50 years from now, it'll be just as hard for the next generation to imagine what happened in Louisville on the first Saturday in May in 2021, as it is for me to fathom those potato fields. 

Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-7137. Follow along on Instagram and Twitter @MaggieMenderski.