Tracks / Traces: Entanglements of horseracing and housing in Lexington, KY

Keywords: growth machine, equine, public-private partnership, housing, horses, racing, sport, archive
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 62

Abstract

Lexington, Kentucky is known as the "Horse Capital of the World." This archival research examines the suburbanization of thoroughbred racing in the region during the Great Depression and New Deal. Over the course of the 1930s, horseracing’s economic and symbolic center shifted from the urban East End of Lexington to the rural edge of Fayette County. This spatial reorganization was part of a broader financial and organizational restructuring of the industry which was locally entangled with the development of one of the first public housing projects in the United States. Findings suggest that a local horse-related growth coalition was able to (1) dispose of its old racing plant by directing new federal housing funds from D.C. to the site, (2) finance the new plant by leveraging private connections in industrial centers such as New York and Chicago, (3) operate under a novel not-for-profit racing model by taking advantage of shifting New Deal tax-exempt regulations, and (4) stake a claim to Lexington’s place identity in part by separating itself from the increasingly Black East End. Two major lenses of analysis are race and property, since this spatial shift occurred during a widely acknowledged whitewashing of the horseracing industry and because it mostly benefited property owners despite being marketed to the community as a universal public good. This continues to have implications today as members of the East End community reclaim the neighborhood’s “place” in narratives about Kentucky’s horseracing heritage.