DAY 6: Vine to Holdrege: How Lincoln has grown up
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By MARGARET REIST / Lincoln Journal Star
In 1924, when H.C. Wagey opened his first drugstore at the corner of 27th and Vine streets, he made sure there was a place for customers to tie up their horses outside.
Young boys played football alongside the store, tossing a ball near an intersection that, more than half a century later, would see 53,000 cars a day pass through.
The trolley that once stopped there is a piece of history now, like the brick streets and horses, the blacksmith shop down the street and the grocery store that shared space with what is now Lincoln’s oldest drugstore.
Today, from the dark brick building that has anchored this corner for 82 years, Wagey Drug’s owner Gary Rihanek can see the neon and lights of a modern-day Walgreens across the street, a part of the latest reinvention of a small slice of the city’s core.
The half-mile stretch of 27th Street from Vine to Holdrege, from Wagey Drug to Alfourat Grocery, is a snapshot of how Lincoln has grown up.
Gaze down this corridor and you’ll see the capital city’s growing diversity, along the crowded shelves of the Hong Kong Market, in the skillets of D’Leon’s Mexican kitchen, on the tables of Sinbad’s Restaurant.
Look back, 10 years or so, and you’ll catch a glimpse of Lincoln’s growing pains, where big-city troubles hung out in the parking lots and once-busy businesses fell dark and deserted.
Listen to those who live and work along this eight-block corridor. You’ll hear Arabic and English, Vietnamese and Spanish, along with something else: pride, poking its head up in the most unlikely places.
Like a barstool in Big Sal’s, where Jerry Zimmerman settled one recent lunchtime. He worked here once, when it was still Fat Pat’s, and he’s lived in the Clinton neighborhood for more than 12 years.
He grew up in south Lincoln and wasn’t sure how he felt about the north part of town, where his wife had spent most of her life.
But he’s remodeled two old houses here and sends two children to Clinton Elementary. He likes what he sees.
“Clinton neighborhood’s a city in itself,” Zimmerman said.
Behind the bar, Chris Delgado — Doughboy to most customers and fellow pool players — is pleased to show off how Big Sal’s got the nod for best sandwich in a recent college newspaper contest.
Vince DiSalvo’s son Steve — a.k.a. “Big Sal,” who years ago played in a basketball league just down the street — bought the place about a year ago.
“It’s a neighborhood bar, and we like that,” Vince DiSalvo said.
The neighborhood has changed.
Once, the area was home to much of Lincoln’s black community, and Wagey Drug responded to its customers, becoming the first place in town to offer ethnic hair and grooming products, Rihanek said.
By the early 1990s, the city’s black population was less concentrated here, and the plethora of rental properties and low-cost housing drew college students and many of Lincoln’s newest immigrants — Vietnamese, Bosnian and Middle Easterners.
Thuy Nguyen was among those who saw an opportunity and took it.
She fled Vietnam with her brothers and sisters in 1980, went to school in Lincoln, then moved to Denver after she married. In 1992, she got a call from her siblings.
Come back, they said. Asian stores are opening here; you could start one, too.
She opened Little Saigon grocery store, and 14 years later, it’s thriving, behind Long John Silver’s in a nondescript building full of everything from bok choy to fresh red snapper, green tea to jasmine rice.
Her customers are not just Asian but Mexican and Sudanese, Middle Eastern and white.
“I want to make my store bigger,” she said.
K.C. Teng saw a similar opportunity 15 years ago and bought an old gas station, tore it down and built a white cement block building he called the Golden Wok.
A few blocks away, in a small strip mall that was once home to cholesterol-laden late-night diners and later Grandpa’s Ribs, Ali Al-Basam saw a chance to try his hand at the restaurant business.
He bought Sinbad’s five years ago, kept the name and changed the menu, making chicken teka and fattoush salad and fresh Iraqi bread each day.
He’d like to move his business south, he said, because he thinks it would be more lucrative, but the rent is cheaper here and his customers — including Mayor Coleen Seng — are loyal.
And it’s where he found longtime waitress Donna Lewis.
“I used to live in a house right there on the corner,” she said. “I was outside one day and he thought I had no job, so he offered me the job.”
It’s like that here, where the homes crowd the street, pushing their way into the business district, the alleys barely able to hold them back.
In Laundryland, where the manufactured freshness of Downey spills into the street, Melissa Runge folds freshly laundered jeans. She likes it here. She can find everything she needs — groceries, fast food, gas, washing machines — in the space of a few blocks.
“I like this part of town a lot, better than the south side of town,” she said.
Along a street that boasts a car rental business and a square little building that offers “FINANCING ON THE SPOT” is a building that once housed Engine House No. 4, when fire rigs were pulled by horses.
The old is here, but so is the new, a concerted effort by city officials to bring new life to a corridor worn down by the years.
The rundown building that housed a carpenter union — years after it housed a coal company — is gone now, replaced by a brand new building belonging to Heartland Optical, a longtime North 27th Street business that didn’t want to move south.
Tom Conrad, who with his brother Casey owns the family business, said this is the perfect location for the wholesale eyewear business that’s grown to include a retail business and in-house optometrist.
For one thing, Conrad said, it’s right in the middle of town, and it’s a place with lots of potential.
City officials have worked hard on that potential, with a major redevelopment effort that began with street signs and moved on to the razing of a number of vacant or dilapidated businesses on the northwest corner of 27th and Vine streets. Walgreens and a new McDonald’s took their place.
There was more: The People’s Health Center, a new police substation, a grocery store where the old Walgreens once stood.
“We really like this area,” Conrad said. “We don’t want to see the revitalization stop.”
The city plans to build a pedestrian overpass right next to Heartland Optical to hook up with a bike path along the old railroad tracks.
“That will just be fabulous for the community here,” Conrad said.
Police Chief Tom Casady sees what economic development has done for the area.
“It used to be ground zero for problems for us,” he said.
The parking lot of the old McDonald’s and accompanying businesses was a hangout where fights and drug deals were commonplace. Police were dogged by problems near Orchard Street, too.
But in the past few years the new businesses — and the police substation — have made a difference.
“It got pretty edgy,” Casady said. “Now the edge has worn off.”
Rihanek likes what he sees, too, despite the breath-catching news that a giant drugstore chain was opening a store across the street.
But he focused on what he could offer customers: home delivery, competitive prices and an owner with roots in the neighborhood.
His pharmacy is part of a county drug assistance program, and it works with the People’s Health Center. Three of the pharmacists are bilingual, answering questions in Spanish and Vietnamese and Farsi as well as English.
And he’s happy with what he’s seeing in the slice of Lincoln anchored by his store: a part of Lincoln that’s growing up quite nicely.
Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.
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