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The Track on Race Street: how Lexington buried the course that made it the Horse Capital — and built Keeneland on the grief
For 107 years Lexington’s thoroughbreds ran at the Kentucky Association course on Race Street — the ground that launched Isaac Murphy and gave America its oldest stakes race. Then the Depression killed it, a housing project rose on its grave, and a handful of horsemen gambled everything on a non-profit called Keeneland.
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In its first year, Lexington asked the state for $973,179 in Red Mile tax money. Frankfort mailed $86,918.50. The subsidy’s full ten-year ledger is now public.
The Kentucky Department of Revenue has produced the last five missing years of the Red Mile TIF’s state ledger — on the exact day it promised. The decade’s total is public for the first time: $3,197,344 paid from 2015 through 2024, after state auditors spent ten years correcting Lexington’s math, striking gamblers’ income taxes…
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“Transparency Is a Choice”: how the Fayette school board dismissed its public, step by step, on the way to a million-dollar exit
On the night Fayette’s school board locked in four more years of Demetrus Liggins, a board member lectured skeptical parents that “sometimes transparency is a choice.” Eighteen months of receipts later, we know whose choice it was.
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How FCPS Got Here: The Liggins Crisis, Traced Back
Sometime around mid-July, Attorney General Russell Coleman’s office is due to answer a question that sounds procedural: did the Fayette County Board of Education violate Kentucky’s Open Meetings Act on June 10, when it emerged from a two-and-a-half-hour closed session and unanimously suspended Superintendent Demetrus Liggins with pay? Liggins filed his appeal June 30;…
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“So This Is Venice!” — When Summer Cloudbursts Turned Main Street Into a River
Every summer, usually in late June or July, Lexington gets a warning that sounds routine until it isn’t: flash flooding possible. The city sits in a shallow limestone bowl, its founding creek — Town Branch — buried under the pavement of Vine Street since the nineteenth century, and when a cloudburst stalls overhead the…
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“More Deadly Than the Battles of the Revolution”: The Crusade to Tame Lexington’s Fourth
In 1910 the Lexington Herald gave a full section front to the safe-and-sane crusade — the campaign insisting America’s fireworks Fourth killed more people than the Revolution it commemorated.
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Brilliant Lectures, Leaky Balloons: How Lexington Did the Fourth a Century Ago
At Woodland Park’s Kentucky Chautauqua, the Fourth of July meant brilliant lectures, helpful schools, splendid music — and a former Opera House stagehand going up in a balloon he called a thing of shreds and patches.
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Lexington Toasted Jefferson’s ‘Declining Days.’ He Had Been Dead for Seventeen Days.
On the 50th Fourth of July, Lexington raised a glass to the living Thomas Jefferson — and learned from the same newspaper, seventeen days later, that he and John Adams had both died that very afternoon.
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The Week Lexington Lined Up on Main Street to See a Dead Whale
In April 1930, a 66-ton embalmed finback named Goliath rolled into Lexington in a glass-walled railcar — and 3,000 people came out the first night.
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The Line: houses, horses, and the money behind Lexington’s growth boundary
Lexington’s single biggest source of local political money is a horse farm. Its growth boundary — the nation’s first, drawn in 1958 — is what that money is defending. A documented, bilateral look at the homebuilders and the horse farms fighting over where to draw the line, traced dollar by dollar through the campaign-finance…