Fame For Churchill Downs: Holds Position With Noted Epsom Downs, Longchamps, Palmero and Hippico Courses., Daily Racing Form, 1939-05-08

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FAME FOR CHURCHILL DOWNS Holds Position With Noted Epsom Downs, Longchamps, Palmero and Hippico Courses. LOUISVILLE, Ky., May 6.— Rustic and picturesque Churchill Downs, with its terraced and landscaped lawns and center field and its spacious grandstand and clubhouse, drew from the pen of an anonymous writer a tribute that is worthy of reproduction. The tribute, which appeared in the columns of the Courier-Journal, follows: "Epsom, Longchamps, Palmero, Hippico, Churchill Downs— these are the most famed five race courses of the world, and the loveliest of these, certainly to Kentuckians if not to all Americans, is Churchill Downs on Derby Day. "Churchill Downs may not be associated with the health-giving waters like Epsom. Its site may bring to mind no ancient monastery, no Parisian beau monde of the fourteenth century, like Longchamps. It may lack the expansiveness and expensiveness of Palmero, with its sea in the distance and beautiful Palmero Pai-k, with its Italian gardens hard by to charm the eyes of the flocking thousands to the course three days each week throughout the year. Churchill Downs may lack the physical background provided for Hippico by the majestic Andes, snowcapped in the summer and snow-skirted in the winter, when the people of the Chilean capital seek recreation there in the glorious sunlight of Santiagos afternoons. "Granting to each of these its peculiar attractiveness, there is nothing quite like Churchill Downs loveliness to heirs of the tradition of sport that brought the race with the chase from Kent and Surrey and Suffolk in old England and Carolina 250 years ago and transplanted both 100 years later across the Appalachian Mountains. Such is the background of Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby."


Persistent Link: https://drf.uky.edu/catalog/1930s/drf1939050801/drf1939050801_29_10
Local Identifier: drf1939050801_29_10
Library of Congress Record: https://lccn.loc.gov/unk82075800