Leaning on his cane, Joseph Mele, 61, stooped to pick up abandoned tickets on the floor of the Off-Track Betting parlor on Lafayette Street. Once in a while, someone drops a winning bet and he cashes it in. Last week he made $50.

“They all sit in the same places with the same clothes doing the same things,” Mr. Mele said of his fellow bettors, who stood in groups around TV screens showing the races. (Women only come in for the high profile races, he noted.) With its bland fluorescent light and exclusively middle-aged, male demographic, the parlor fits a stereotype New Yorkers have long had of the city’s betting halls.

It is an image the president of the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation, Raymond Casey, is trying to change. The corporation will soon open a sleek parlor on West 72nd Street with plasma screens and a VIP lounge, and it is launching initiatives to pull in younger gamblers and “break down the barriers that exist for people to try sports racing,” he said.

“An OTB parlor built 30 years ago is not an environment welcoming to some people,” Mr. Casey said in an interview. “It’s not a look I’m particularly proud of. … The demographic we have now is not the demographic for the future.”

For this weekend’s Belmont Stakes, the corporation is setting up a tent on Military Island at Times Square. Passers-by will be able to watch the races on ABC’s giant video screen and place bets with customer service representatives dressed in jockey outfits. ESPN will air occasional broadcasts from the scene.

Off-track betting is scheduled to be available on the Off-Track Betting Corporation’s Web site by the fall. Betting through BlackBerries and cell phones is also in the works.

But hard times could be ahead if the corporation fails to pull in larger crowds or convince legislators to change its distribution plan, according to a study commissioned by the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The Off-Track Betting Corporation has been operating at a multimilliondollar loss because it is mandated to turn over more money to the state than it can afford, the study found.

The corporation handles more than $1 billion in bets a year through its 71 parlors, thousands of phone betting accounts, and mobile betting computers set up at restaurants. Its estimated $125 million in annual profit is distributed to the racing industry, the state, and the city.

Last year, the city received $17.8 million from the corporation, which began operations in 1971.

“If NYCOTB is forced to curb or suspend its operations, the flow of revenue to the city, the state, and the industry will decline sharply, with cascading economic impacts felt by the entire racing industry in the state,” the study, by the Boston Consulting Group, found. The industry has a $1.4 billion impact on the state’s economy each year, it also found.

Gambling in the city is increasing, but fewer people are betting on horse races, the study found. Mr. Casey said that by making parlors more attractive and inviting, the company could recover some of the market from competitors.

The new facility at West 72nd Street will typify the updated décor of the city’s betting parlors, he said. It will have flat screens instead of old televisions, interactive wage machines, and walls covered with high-resolution murals of horses thundering down the track. The VIP lounge will allow “folks who wager a few hundred thousand dollars a year” more room to spread out and analyze information about the horse races, Mr. Casey said.

When a new high-tech OTB branch was set up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, the number of wages placed more than doubled, he said.

The corporation is also coming out with a smaller system of betting computers it can bring to high-end and middle-end restaurants and bars around the city to hold evening game nights.

“Gaming is changing,” Mr. Casey said. “It’s much more competitive. We no longer have a monopoly … but we absolutely can get people to know how exciting horse racing is again.”