It`s the winner`s circle for the bluebloods and frontrunners who come to the new Arlington International Racecourse-the private and posh penthouse of track owner Richard L. Duchossois.
A small complex shaped like a horseshoe high above the finish line on the fifth-floor ”Sky Suite” level of the racetrack, the penthouse is private stabling for the kinds of folks who caused horseracing to be called ”the sport of kings.”
The Penthouse, a 1,600-square-foot area occupying the entire southeast corner of the fifth floor, is off limits to the public except by pre-arrangement or special invitation. While it is the actual self-contained private apartment of Duchossois, he uses it mainly for entertaining celebrity guests, rather than as a permanent home. The rest of the fifth floor, adjacent to the penthouse, contains the luxurious Sky Suites-beautifully decorated and appointed sky boxes overlooking the track-which can be rented by the public.
Horsemen who have traveled the world say this area, combined with the rest of the Sky Suite level, makes it ”comparable to Longchamps with the graciousness of Chantilly,” both tracks in France. The world`s newest track in Tokyo is large but has nothing to compare with the facilities of Arlington, which opens its season today.
”I`ve been to every major racetrack in the world, and no other track has anything like this,” says Duchossois, who is responsible for its concept.
”The only thing that I know of that might be comparable is the Queen`s apartment at Ascot. Or maybe the Aga Khan`s Ciga Club at Longchamps in France,” adds Mr. D., as he is known to friends and family.
Not everyone can just stroll in to the Penthouse. Special guests arrive by elevator or the spiral staircase to the fifth floor and a private door that opens into a small foyer-the starting gate for a ”lifestyles of the rich and horsey” experience.
To the right, through large white doors, one gets a peek at Duchossois`
private bedroom suite, done in classic Virginia hunt country taste-reserved, masculine fabric on the bed, wingback chairs upholstered in black fabric embroidered with tiny trotting horses, old prints and engravings on the wall, a stagecoach trunk for storage.
The majority of guests, however, take the left-hand turn into a half-circle-shaped room, 120 feet long, that curves around the southwest corner of the grandstand at approximately the finish line.
This is also where Duchossois has entertained celebrities (Walter Matthau, Whitney Houston, Cab Calloway, Loretta Swit), sports figures (Mike Ditka, Rick Sutcliffe, Dan Hampton) and politicians (Jim Edgar, Jim Thompson). In addition, Duchossois has hosted the aristocracy of the racing world here.
”It`s beautiful; there`s no other way to say it. I was flabbergasted when I went up there,” said Ron Magers, news anchor at WMAQ-Ch. 5.
Actors and entertainers seem appropriate in this room, which is like an artful stage set.
”The original concept was supposed to look like a big porch on a Colonial home,” explains the designer of the project, Richard Bielefeld of Elgin.
”We tried to make the room look like it was a lawn party at someone`s home-sofas have been brought out of the house, and overstuffed pieces are mixed with wicker and lawn furniture.”
A row of white columns forms a half-circle on the raised wooden porch as if it were the back end of an antebellum mansion.
The side interior walls are brick ”painted white and then hand-rubbed half off to give the feeling of an old home,” Bielefeld says.
Between the ”porch” and the glass wall overlooking the track are a continuing series of furniture groupings in wicker and wrought iron and upholstered chairs in elegant floral fabrics. Television monitors are disguised by making them look like part of big trellised planters.
It has been pulled off artfully, with many horsey details. There`s a large marble-topped table with cut-out trotting horses running around the base, deep-green enamel painted chairs and tack trunks hand-painted with racing and farm scenes and rare antique equestrian bronzes on the tables.
At the other end is the Duchossois library, with its knotty-pine paneling around the fireplace, shelves of antique stud books, turf guides, antique comb-back Windsor chairs flanking the sofa, small paintings and prints by British sporting artists.
It all leaves far behind the image of the American racetrack as a slice of Sodom and Gomorrah and its typical patron as ”an older guy chomping on a cigar,” as Duchossois says.
”We wanted to completely change the concept of racing in Chicago,” he explains. ”Racing did not have a good image. We`re in the entertainment business, not the gambling business. We wanted to make this a social center for corporations to do entertaining.”
Since he entered racing in the early 1970s, Duchossois has emerged as one of the most influential individuals in the thoroughbred world. He made his fortune after World War II when he took over his father-in-law`s rail-car manufacturing company, which consisted of a tiny shack with six employees, and built it into one of the leading freight car manufacturing companies in the world.
After Arlington Park was destroyed by fire in 1985, Duchossois rebuilt his racecourse on its ashes. He approached the monumental task as any designer would.
He started by dividing up his customers according to their habits, both in taste and spending.
”For the first, the linoleum trade, we tried to make it better than at home, but not so fancy they`d be uncomfortable,” he says, referring to the ground floor of the track, habitat of your basic two-buck bettor. ”Then the second group is not quite necktie.” They got the lounge with English clubhouse look, open to everyone, that looks down into the paddock.
”Then there`s another group that wants to be entertained, to dress up,” Duchossois says. ”We gave them the 5th floor, strictly a coat-and-tie affair. And we tried to furnish it on that basis.”
His penthouse project, however, threw the first New York firm that tried to master it.
When they got through, ”it looked like a hospital waiting room, very stark, not warm, and didn`t reflect R.L.`s taste at all,” says Jack Wetzel, a close friend of the family.
It made Duchossois spook and rear just to look at it. He closed it down after its June 28, 1989, re-opening and called in Bielefeld, an interior designer who lives on a horse farm in Elgin and has been involved for many years in training and showing horses.
Bielefeld was asked to tear it all out and redo the penthouse in six weeks.
”Give it the look of the New York Jockey Club,” were Duchossois`
orders. ”I`ve never been to the New York Jockey Club, but evidently I achieved it,” Bielefeld jokes, for on Sept. 2, 1989, the day of the Arlington Million, he overheard patrons saying that`s what it reminded them of.
”I knew it was going to be a terrific challenge, but I really wanted to prove myself out there, so I took it on,” he says.
He brought the work in under the wire, greatly pleasing his employer.
”It`s putting on the dog a little,” Duchossois says of the results, but he adds that ”it`s an entertainment facility equal to none.”
Now he has that special place to park the stakes runners and stow away celebrities. ”Celebrities really don`t want to be out in the boxes because they like privacy; they don`t like to be constantly signing autographs. Now we have a place of the quality and decor they`re used to,” Mr. D. says.
Duchossois was so pleased with the refurbished penthouse suite that he asked Bielefeld to decorate three of the 19 Sky Suites. The penthouse and Sky Suites can be rented ($1,000 on weekdays; $1,200 on weekends, with a $700 food and beverage minimum). But don`t try to rent one on Arlington Million Day.
”We seldom rent them then; they`re in use for all our own entertaining,”
Duchossois says.
Though he works 14-to-16-hour days at the track, Duchossois has yet to use the apartment himself.
Instead, a helicopter whisks Duchossois home to his Colonial-style house at his Hill `N Dale Farm in Barrington, on the edge of a pond lined with weeping willows tossing their ”manes” into the water, spic-and-span white barns and green pastures filled with gamboling thoroughbreds behind miles of white fences as far as the eye can see. . . . But that`s another story. –
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The penthouse, corporate meeting rooms and the skyboxes, are available through Maria Breen, in charge of group sales, 708-255-4300, extension 7637.)
