Morris Cafritz

After briefly settling in New York, the family moved to Washington and operated a small grocery store on 24th and P Streets NW.

[3] Cafritz began his business career in 1904 by buying the Star Coal and Coke Company, at 315 Q Street, with a $1,400 loan from his father.

[3] In 1922, he founded Cafritz Construction and acquired a large tract of land for $700,000, which he financed with a down payment of $35,000; he eventually built 3,000 houses on the site.

[5][2] Pentagon City was founded in 1946, when developers Morris Cafritz and Charles H. Tompkins acquired a 190-acre site of empty fields and commercial warehouses for $1.5 million.

[2][3] On the Pentagon City Site Morris Cafritz developed the massive 1,600 unit River House Apartments.

In the early 1960's Morris Cafritz received approval to bring the Washington, DC, Metro to the Pentagon City.

Prior to the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, racial discrimination was legal in real estate.

[10] In July 1929, Cafritz married Gwendolyn Detre de Surany, twenty years his junior.

She was daughter of Hungarian immunologist, Dr Laszlo Detre de Surany, co-discoverer of the Wassermann test for syphilis, and his wife, Lillian Coblenzer, who settled at Washington in the 1920s and he became chief immunologist for the United States Public Health Service.

When Gwendolyn died in 1988, her instructions to leave her entire estate to the foundation was challenged by her children, who were already multimillionaires.