From Gambling to Garden Apartments HAYES STreet & MINNESOTA AVEnue NE If you had stood here 100 years ago, you might have heard the cheering crowds and thunder- ing hoofbeats of Benning Racetrack just across the railroad tracks. Beginning in 1890, Benning was the best-equipped race course in Washington. Some of the nation’s leading thoroughbreds had their first runs at Ben- ning before delighted crowds including presidents and plumbers alike. “Nowhere may such a cosmo- politan crowd be seen as at Benning,” declared the Evening Star. In 1908 reform laws ended legal gambling at Benning. Nevertheless, and despite the loss of the elegant grandstand to fire in 1915, horse training and automobile races continued into the early 1930s. Although Congress debated bills to revive betting, religious reformers and animal rights activists defeated them, and the race track closed for good. In 1942 Howard University Architecture Professor Albert I. Cassell (1895–1969) purchased the old racing grounds to build Mayfair Mansions, the Colonial style garden apartment complex he de- signed. Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, famed Washington evangelist and host of the CBS radio show “Happy Am I,” became a major investor. Mayfair Mansions’ 500 first-rate, affordable units for working- and middle-class black families opened in 1946, at a time when housing covenants severely limited options for African Americans. Elder Michaux commented, “Some people talk about going to Heaven and living well. I believe in people living well down here.” Mayfair Mansions was listed on the DC Inventory of Historic Sites and the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.
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