Largest Casinos in Portland. The largest casino in Portland, Oregon according to gaming machines and table games put together, is Portland Meadows. It has 150 gaming machines and 0 tables games. You will also find 4 restaurants. You can contact the Portland Meadows at (503) 285-9144. In 1946, the state got its first horse racing pari-mutuel racetrack, Portland Meadows, which operated at its original location until 2019, when the track was closed. Portland Meadows is still in operation at a new location but no longer have live racing, although they do offer off-track betting and a poker room. Portland Meadows, Portland: See 19 reviews, articles, and 7 photos of Portland Meadows, ranked No.127 on Tripadvisor among 440 attractions in Portland. Portland Tourism; Portland Hotels. Slot machines, poker, off track betting and keno. We even won a little money.
After 73 years, luck has finally run out for Portland Meadows.
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The North Portland racetrack will close its doors in June and more than likely has seen its last race. Though the sale of the facility and its acreage isn’t yet final, bulldozers may soon be razing the grandstand, ripping up its dirt oval track, and turning its grassy infield into warehouses.
Chalk it up as another loss for the Old Portland aesthetic: broken-down beauty goes under and rank commercialism rises in its place.
There’s no denying that Portland Meadows is long past its prime. Attendance has dwindled substantially since its heyday, leaving the hulking facility almost empty, though always open. On most days, just a few gamblers and day drinkers shuffled between the betting terminals, bars, and overhead bank of televisions.
Yet the track’s emptiness and decrepitude remained part of its charm. The grandstand created a cavernous space where enthusiasts, for lack of anything better to do, wasted time and money.
Tuesday at the Track from Cecilia Brown on Vimeo.
They couldn’t have picked a better place. Portland Meadows was their dilapidated castle, formerly grand and somehow—despite all the horse shit—still elegant. It almost felt holy, but at the same time a repository for dead things; a participatory mausoleum.
Meadows was a place for characters to gather. Willy Vlautin, the poet laureate of Northwest horse racing, included a few of them in his novel Lean on Pete. But you didn’t need a novelist’s eye to see the small dramas, the glumness of empty pockets, and the glimmers of hope and happiness that punctuated certain afternoons.
On race days, the place felt alive with the patois of working-class Spanish, while the grandstand floor became littered with detritus from muddy boots—telltale signs of people who lived and worked on the Meadows backstretch until the racing circuit moved elsewhere.
Struggling horse trainers from the dustiest corners of the Northwest filled bar stools well before noon. They’d arrived to race or sell their best and worst horses—and the bar was as good a place as the winner’s circle for that.
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And for the horses, they were like the track—all of them down on their luck, washed up, or past a prime that was never all that good to begin with. But they were magisterial, too, showing up for work no matter the weather. Yet on most days, there were no horses at all, and the gamblers who came anyway were diehards.
On a quiet weekday afternoon, I once saw a man get increasingly belligerent while watching the simulcast feed. The horses he had placed a bet on, somewhere in the world, had apparently been slower than their competitors. Eventually his yelling had reached such a level of nastiness and volume, security decided it was time for him to go.
He did not go quietly, screaming at the security guard as he was escorted out: “DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH MONEY I LOSE HERE EVERY DAY?” The few who remained chuckled knowingly; that incident pretty much summed up the place. Portland Meadows was one of the few venues in the city where the biggest losers felt like the biggest VIPs.
These days plenty is being built in Portland for those who are generally considered to be society’s “somebodies.” The city is increasingly tailoring itself to people with good taste in art, politics, real estate, food, and even sport. The race track was where the other people went. And they liked it there.
What’s not to like? The empty eeriness of the grandstand was coated in an industrial calm: the buzz from neon lights, and the electric hum of the slot machines and simulcast televisions. Yelps of pleasure or pain, depending on how fast a preferred horse turned out to be, occasionally punctured the serenity. To help toast the good times and drown the bad, the drinks were cheap and stiff, and nobody cared whether or not it was noon.
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In short, it was a specific sort of paradise: gambling and drinking, peace and quiet. But we all know that paradise, sooner or later, gets paved over for parking lots. Or in this case, warehouses.