Well, now that The Baltimore Sun has run their obligatory annual Preakness trash story — you know, number of tons removed (100), number of pairs of underwear found (several), number of recyclables recycled (apparently, zero) — the annual horse-race-and-boozefest is officially over.

Before we put our beer funnels back in their velvet-lined storage cases, we ought to try and learn something from the fascinating social engineering implicit in this event.

The Preakness is sort of Baltimore-in-Miniature, to steal from the famous phrase applied to Maryland. It’s got the city’s social classes neatly segregated: the hoi polloi in the infield, the high-falutin’ in the corporate tents and the have-nots outside the fence.

Consider how it’s all layed out: there’s X-rated debauchery marketed at $60 per person, all “contained” inside a cloak of respectability which is a one-mile oval racetrack used by a dying sport. The “respectable” folks outside the oval and the riff-raff on the inside obviously need each other and the admission-fee-plus-three-minute-race are more a gesture toward legitimacy than a charge for value received.

People make no bones about the fact that the one-day Preakness subsidizes an entire year of the racetrack’s money-losing and an entire industry surrounding it. Subsidies, debauchery, pathology, social cross-pollination and segregation – it’s the stuff that urban life is, for better or worse, made of. What is really going on here?

Lots of ink and many pixels were spilled on the subject of the organizers’ effort — after last year’s disastrous ban on beer coolers — to lure the booze-and-boob crowd back with a cheezy campaign: “Get Your Preak On!” “I got my Preak on with the Pool Boy!” Etc. etc. Face it, it worked, attendance was up.

What’s weirder than the intense brevity of the Preakness is how dead Pimlico is after the the annual circus is over and maybe the better focus is on how to enliven this depressed part of north Baltimore by making Pimlico a genuine 365-day place. This does not have to mean slots, it could mean anything else built around horse racing as a motif or icon rather than just a threatened dying industry.

Horse racing is merely a brand, upon which to organize all the many activities that can and could take place at Pimlico.

That it is such a strong motif — capable of bringing together such disparate activities as the “sport of kings”, the infield debauchery and the gambling (which the Sun once decried) — is a credit to the historic iconic power of horse racing, but really says nothing about its future as an actual sport.

We should use the power of this motif, and all the historic legendary lore that goes with it, to remake Pimlico as a year-round-attraction.

No one in his wildest visions could imagine this meaning uninterrupted horse racing, but many other events and activities, such as the State Fair, could be part of this, maybe even (gasp) slot machines. No other racetrack in Maryland, or any other place, has this kind of iconic power. For this reason, Pimlico should be Maryland’s one racetrack — perhaps financed by the redevelopment of the state fairgrounds in Timonium. There may be only enough support for one of these places.

A last thought:

Just because the infield was a success this year does not mean they’ve found the winning formula. Once people spend $40 – $60, lured by clever promotion and marketing, they’re going to have fun even if it kills them. It does not mean they will come back. Pimlico must constantly reinvent itself – something horse racing has never done, but the gambling industry continues to do constantly.