In May 2021, Buzz Perry and his wife, Dolores, both contracted COVID-19. They died ten days apart. Their son, Frank, kept the shop open for a few more months, then closed it for good in January 2022, ending a 57-year run. The shop was Buzz-A-Rama in Kensington, Brooklyn, the last slot car raceway in New York City.
Buzz Perry opened it in 1965, the same year the slot car craze reached its peak. Forty other slot car shops in the city closed around him, one after another, across the arcade era of the 1980s and the rise of the internet. Buzz kept the lights on because he owned the building, and because a small group of men who still came on weekends needed a place to go. The story of Buzz-A-Rama’s closing mirrors the rise and fall of an American phenomenon that once seemed unstoppable.
In 1966, roughly 5,000 slot car raceways operated across the United States—more than the number of bowling alleys or movie theaters at the time. Today, fewer than 200 remain. The hobby exploded quickly. By 1965, the slot car industry in the U.
S. was generating $500 million a year, equivalent to roughly $3. 3 billion today. Aurora alone sold 25 million cars in five years, more than Ford and Chevrolet combined.
The boom supported a vast ecosystem of manufacturers, including Aurora, Cox, Revell, Russkit, Eldon, Strombecker, K&B, Riggen, and Champion. At its peak, the culture was deep. Three monthly magazines—Slot Car Racing, Model Car and Track Scale Slot Car Racing—were dedicated to the hobby. Ford sponsored a national championship for kids called the Ford Aurora Model Motoring Competition, betting that the boy who raced an Aurora car at age 10 would buy a Mustang at age 20.
Thousands of boys entered, and three kids from Rapid City, South Dakota, a town of 43,000 people, dominated the competition for years. What killed the empire was not a single event, but a convergence of forces. The hobby became a profession. Men who showed up on Saturday mornings stopped being fathers with their sons and became engineers with soldering irons, oscilloscopes, and custom-wound motors that cost more than the cars families drove.
By 1966, 80% of the cars on commercial raceway tracks were scratch-built, handmade from steel wire, brass, and separate components. The factory cars that had started the craze were now too slow to compete. A 12-year-old who had learned at the rail could not keep up with a 40-year-old who had spent $300 on a single chassis, and one by one the young racers stopped coming. The economics were brutal.
A raceway needed massive space—eight-foot tables, room for spectators, storage, and a counter—while revenue came from teenagers paying quarters for five-minute heats. There were not enough minutes in the day to charge enough quarters to cover the rent on a strip mall storefront that size. Owners who survived were those who ran a hobby shop or a restaurant on the side; the rest simply closed. Then came the winter of 1968.
The annual industry trade show was held in Chicago that year, and a blizzard buried the city the same week. Exhibitors set up their booths and waited; the buyers never came. The halls were empty, and the new products sat on display tables nobody visited. A slot car historian who was there later said plainly: “Nobody came and that absolutely killed the hobby.
” Companies that had been making slot cars for five years looked at the empty aisles and quit that week. If the blizzard was the earthquake, Hot Wheels was the flood. Mattel introduced Hot Wheels in 1968, and it did to the slot car industry what television had done to radio. A Hot Wheels car cost one dollar and was ready to race straight out of the package—no soldering, no balancing, no gear ratios, no three weekends of building.
The kid who had stood at the slot car rail with his nose against the glass because he could not afford a quarter suddenly had a car of his own that went fast, looked real, and required no technical skill to operate. The raceways closed one by one. In Los Angeles, 50 raceways became two. In New York City, 40 became one.
Across the country, 5,000 became fewer than 200 by 1975. The strip mall spaces that had been filled with motors and the smell of ozone became carpet stores, insurance offices, and storage units. Within a few years, there was no evidence they had ever been anything else. The raceways were more than stores.
The wooden tracks were routed by hand into eight-foot tables with banked curves and straightaways running the length of the room. Cars sat in glass cases along the wall, arranged by scale. A man behind the counter knew every motor, every gear ratio, and every trick for making a car stick to the track at full speed. Children built their first competition cars at that counter, learning to solder leads, align axles, and balance weight so the car would corner without lifting.
For many fathers and sons, the raceway was a shared place of quiet connection. Some fathers picked up controllers and, within a month, had built their own cars at the same counter. Saturday mornings were spent racing side by side on adjacent lanes. Not every child who loved the raceway could afford to race.
Some stood at the rail every afternoon and watched without playing because a quarter was grocery money. They memorized the cars, knew which were fast and which were built for looks, and gave them names in their heads. Some of the best racers in those raceways started as that kid at the rail who could not afford a quarter; they watched longer, learned more, and when they finally got a hold of a controller, they already knew every corner by heart. The slot car empire did not die because people stopped loving it.
It died because the world stopped making room for the kind of thing it was—a thing that required patience, a place, and showing up on a Saturday morning to stand next to strangers who shared one interest, racing for no money and no trophy except the mechanical joy of watching something you built go faster than you thought it could. In January 2022, the lights went out at Buzz-A-Rama, the last of 40 in New York City. The tracks that had carried a million races sat empty in a room that smelled like dust instead of ozone.