this busy section once was a “country road” to Washingtonians looking for peace and recreation. If you drove by here a century ago, you would have passed woods and large estates, maybe even fox hunters. Across Georgia was the private Villa Flora Club, offering live music and fine dining amid “a spacious lawn, rich with the perfume of roses.” By 1907 the club’s 1,000 members frequently made the society columns. The Villa Flora closed around 1915. The Villa Flora rented meeting space to other organizations, and in 1906 leased property to the Automobile Club of Washington to build its club house. This social club appealed to the city’s earliest car owners, men of wealth and leisure who could afford the expensive “sport” of “auto- mobiling.” From here it was a short ride to the Brightwood Trotting Park, which briefly offered commercial auto races. In one 1903 event, the fastest cars traveled at 15 miles per hour. After the Washington club affiliated with the American Automobile Association, members gained access to other AAA clubhouses for dining and sleeping accommodations long before motels and fast food restaurants lined America’s highways. By the 1920s, falling prices for automobiles greatly increased the number of drivers and took most of the sport out of automobiling. Long after housing replaced the open fields, Beck’s Polar Bear frozen custard stand across Georgia, roughly where the Safeway parking lot is today, attracted folks from all over. The large plaster polar bears became a neighborhood landmark. Automobiling On the Avenue georgia avenue and underwood street nw
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