Both sides of the street
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By NANCY HICKS / Lincoln Journal Star
South Lincoln is where the rich, professional people live. North Lincoln is where blue-collar workers live. That popularly held stereotype probably began a century ago, and it lives on today.
When North Star and Southwest high schools opened four years ago, North Star students gave new icons to the old division when they joked about Wal-Mart High and Von Maur High, North Star theater teacher Greg Gibbs said.
His North Star students, who recently won the statewide one-act play competition, have moved beyond that simplified comparison, he said.
O Street is the imaginary line dividing the down-to-earth north and snooty south.
But 27th Street traces some of the realities that give shape to the perception — from Wal-Mart and Sam’s on the far north to SouthPointe in the south, where a pianist serenades shoppers in the anchor department store.
Along the way, 27th Street swings past the area just north of O where most blacks lived during a more rigidly segregated era.
Further south, the street bisects the Country Club area, where white doctors, lawyers and businessmen built roomy, two-story homes before the Depression. In fact, the Country Club area helped cement the modern perception that the rich folks lived south, according to local historians.
Even today, people will pay more than a house is really worth because it’s in the Country Club neighborhood, Realtor Craig Loeck said.
Some of north Lincoln’s reputation came from the jobs available in the days people generally lived near their jobs.
Havelock was home to rail yards, including the Burlington Northern repair shops, and to an old truck factory converted to the Goodyear Plant.
“I can remember as a kid, with the Burlington Northern in Havelock, that if you lived north of O and you worked north of O, that made you blue collar,” said Lancaster County Assessor Norm Agena, who lived in north Lincoln and whose dad sold real estate and then was a carpenter.
“The rich people lived in Piedmont and the ritzy Country Club area. If you got invited over there, to one of those houses, it was a big deal,” he said.
These broad generalizations obviously don’t hold true for every neighborhood. Both north and south Lincoln include an assortment of housing, from modest two-bedroom homes to mansions.
And several early communities in north Lincoln began as college towns — Nebraska Wesleyan University in Uni Place and Nebraska Christian College, later Cotner College, in Bethany. In fact, Bethany once was nicknamed “the holy suburb,” local historian Jim McKee said.
East Campus also has its own professors row, around 37th and 38th and Idylwild, from Holdrege to Apple, historian Ed Zimmer said.
In fact, there always has been a mix of demographics and housing both north and south, Zimmer said.
Today you can buy a homes for more than half a million in the Fallbrook area north of the Highlands. And there are bigger homes for the upper middle class in Regents Heights in the northeast and Vintage Heights in the southeast, he pointed out.
Agena, who bought his first homes in north Lincoln because they were cheaper, thinks the old stereotypes are breaking down. Lot prices are much more similar between north and south than they were 30 years ago, he said.
“There was a time when you could buy a lot cheaper in north Lincoln, and then the Highlands came along and changed that whole misconception,” Agena said.
The division may erode further as housing developments for commuting professionals grow along Interstate 80 between Lincoln and Omaha.
But while the working class and the wealthy live on both sides of town, statistics show a wealthier south in general
Go south on 27th Street and the incomes rise, the education level rises and the homes get pricier, based on a statistical analysis done by the newspaper.
But south Lincoln wasn’t always home to Lincoln’s prestige houses. Early wealthy Lincolnites built mansions along 14th and R in the late 1800s.
In fact, the home of wealthy businessman John D. MacFarland once stood at the corner of 14th and Q where Wendy’s now sells burgers and fries.
There also were mansions around 25th and S streets, professors’ houses one would expect to find close to campus, Zimmer said.
“There was not a bright line between north and south in that era,” he said.
It wasn’t until the turn of the century that the wealthy began to build south of O, McKee said. They built their big houses in the area around First Plymouth Church near 20th and D streets, then along Sheridan Boulevard, with construction spurts in 1909 and 1916, and on to the Country Club area during the late teens and ’20s.
Big lots on winding roads in the Piedmont area took shape from the 1920s through the ’50s, and The Knolls came along in the 1960s.
Today, the grandest houses are being built south, in Wilderness Ridge and at Iron Gate, a gated community east of 84th Street.
No one knows the origin of the southern flow, but Zimmer guesses it occurred early in the 20th century after the depression of 1893 and the Salt Creek floods separated Bethany from downtown.
“The city keeps growing to the south, and that’s where the biggest houses still are,” Zimmer said.
Still, longtime Lincoln residents tend to buy homes where they grew up, said Sue Glynn, a retired real estate agent.
Reach Nancy Hicks at 473-7250 or nhicks@journalstar.com.
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