Editor’s note: This July, as Colorado Springs gears up for its 150th birthday on the 31st, The Gazette has prepared a series of articles on the history of our city. Check back for fascinating glimpses into the people and events that have shaped Colorado Springs into the landmark it is today.

On the north end of downtown Colorado Springs, the legacy of Fannie Mae Duncan lives on.

A cream-colored home rises three floors above North Corona Street. Salmon-colored trim accentuates the distinct features of the 130-year-old mansion. Well-maintained plants rise from beds of mulch that frame a sidewalk leading to the front porch. A squirrel-resistant birdfeeder hangs nearby above two red benches, their paint peeling off to reveal the gray wood underneath.

The mansion was once home to Fannie Mae Duncan, a Black Colorado Springs entrepreneur who became synonymous with a simple phrase: “Everybody welcome.” Today the Corona Street house is owned by the nonprofit BethHaven and provides a long-term home for 16 adults with severe, persistent mental illness. Duncan’s famous mantra is now the mission for the home she once owned.

“We kind of feel like we carry on that tradition,” BethHaven President Mike Van de Casteele said.

When BethHaven re-opened the home in 1995 after a $500,000 renovation, Duncan, who died in 2005, donned a dark pink dress to cut the ribbon. It was Duncan who relocated the home in 1953 from it’s location at 801 N. Nevada. “Fannie Mae saved that house,” said Kay Esmiol, who knew Duncan for 12 years and helped her write her memoir. “It’s a piece of history.”

That history is not unfamiliar from today. Dr. James Hart built the house in 1881 and used it as a de-facto overflow hospital to treat patients during the 1918 flu epidemic.

When Duncan moved the home, it was cut into three pieces, which sat idle because police said Duncan didn’t have the proper permits to move the home, Esmiol said.

After Duncan successfully relocated the home to its current location, it was a refuge in a city that still openly discriminated against its Black residents and visitors. She provided the home to young Black musicians and professionals who weren’t welcome at The Broadmoor, The Antlers and other Colorado Springs hotels.

Those musicians, and much of Colorado Springs, were welcome at the Cotton Club, where Duncan hung the “everybody welcome” sign that shone against the racism of a city that, at the time, made Black people sit in the balconies of movie theaters and use the back doors of restaurants.

“We had every race in the club,” Duncan said at the BethHaven grand opening in 1995.

In large part due to her efforts to integrate the Cotton Club, the city of Colorado Springs in 2019 erected a statue of her outside the Pikes Peak Center.

But the city that Duncan gave so much to was not always kind to her. In the 1970s, city officials dispossessed her of the Cotton Club as part of an urban renewal project. They paid her half of what she said a private buyer had offered her months before, she told The Gazette in 1981. The city tore down the club, making way for offices of The Colorado Springs Sun newspaper, bought by The Gazette’s then-owner, Freedom Communications Inc., 11 years later.

Katherine Sturdevant, a history professor at Pikes Peak Community College, said that although Colorado Springs was more racially integrated than other cities around the nation, the closure of the Cotton Club could not have happened unless the city undervalued its cultural value, and the city may even have had “a racist attitude toward it.”

The city gave Duncan land as part of her compensation for giving up the Cotton Club. But when Duncan tried to build a new venue on the land, her liquor license was denied. The property the city gave her was in a part of town that did not permit liquor licenses, Esmiol said. In 1977, she was indicted for allowing gambling at another establishment she owned. The charges were later dropped.

Duncan’s story is certainly one of entrepreneurial excellence, empathy and humanity, said Jamal Ratchford, a history professor at Colorado College who teaches classes on race and ethnicity. But it is also a story of trauma, and that makes things more complicated, Ratchford said.

“Americans are very much passionate about stories with nice, neat happy endings,” he said.

But Duncan’s story does not have that ending. Stripped of her means to make money, Duncan left town in 1981, unable to afford the mansion she and many others had once called home.