Marion Post Wolcott's Photos Of 1939 Hialeah Race Track

As Women's History Month ends, HuffPost Miami revisits the work of Marion Post Wolcott, a Farm Security Administration photographer who shot South Florida in the 1930s.

Wolcott, a peer of Dorothea Lange, visited Homestead farms in 1939 to document the harsh lives of migrant workers. See her Homestead photos here.

Marion Post Wolcott

But Wolcott also visited more posh scenes in South Florida in the 1930s like the Hialeah Race Track.

The track, one of the oldest recreational venues in South Florida, sits at Palm Avenue and East 4th Avenue in Hialeah.

Although it opened in 1921, it didn't officially open as Hialeah Race Track until 1932, after restoration from the 1926 hurricane and a fancy new grandstand was built by architect Lester W. Geisler.

Wolcott photographed the track, horses, and grandstand in 1939 but ran into some trouble as a female photographer once she tried to snap some gambling scenes.

As she told the Archives of American Art:

…they didn't maul me; I mean they didn't throw things at me or arrest me or anything of that kind. I was trying to take some pictures of the other side of it and I had taken some of the racetrack and of people in the stands and I was trying to take some in some of the gambling places, and they did take my camera. I got it back again but they took the film and told me to get out and stay out, and I didn't think that particularly was because I was a woman; they were annoyed that I felt I could get away with it because I was a woman, which was exactly what I was trying to do.

Click below for Wolcott's 1939 photographs of the Hialeah Race Track: