DAY 1: The road, the city transformed

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BY JoANNE YOUNG / Lincoln Journal Star

It mutated.

Did it happen overnight?

One decade it seemed like 27th Street was a quiet street on the edge of a prairie capital. And the next thing you know, it was rushing out to meet the interstate, hollering about all the shopping and the eating and the football watching and the fairgoing you could access through its portal.

If that wasn’t enough, it took off in the other direction, eating up farmland and spitting out shopping malls and autoplexes and Colorado-style clubhouses with attached golf courses.

It’s not a competition. Really.

But if it was, 27th Street could be voted Lincoln’s most thorough thoroughfare. Most diverse. Most transformed.

Consider how big a lead, in most cases, it has over other Lincoln streets. It’s the only north-south street to carry traffic uninterrupted from city limit to city limit. It runs 12.19 miles from getting friendly with Arbor Road on the north to Rokeby Road on the south.

* 33rd Street is interrupted several times, at Salt Creek, Antelope Park, Nebraska 2 and Tierra Park.

* 40th Street is chopped into four segments and runs fewer than eight miles.

* 48th Street, barely eight miles, stops at Old Cheney, London and Union Hill.

* 56th Street is closest in length at 11.25 miles, but it has a gap between Cornhusker and Logan.

* 70th Street links the north city limit to the south, too, but its run from Arbor Road to Pine Lake is just 10.6 miles.

* 84th Street runs uninterrupted through the city limits for 9.15 miles, from Havelock Avenue to Yankee Hill Road.

Yes, 27th Street has it all. Besides the commercial development, and both discount and high-end shopping malls — and toys, some of the best toy shopping awaits on North 27th —  it has lots of residential development, with blocks and blocks of houses and apartment complexes lining the street.

It passes through middle-class and low-income neighborhoods, and those that house university presidents and bank presidents.

Doug Ganz grew up on the corner of 27th and High streets in the Country Club area, after his folks bought the house in 1962. At the time, he recollected, Lincoln went only as far as Stockwell Pharmacy, 38 blocks south of O Street.

South of that, it was open land with some developments beginning in what is now The Knolls. Rousseau Elementary was built a ways to the east a couple of years later.

Back then, Ganz said, his dad could park on 27th Street.

“In the ’60s it was spectacular,” he said.

In the ’70s, the street got busier with the development of Southwood and The Knolls.

In such nonresidential areas as 27th and Capitol Parkway, some trees fell victim to the need for wider streets. And some businesses have suffered over the years because of widening projects.

In fact, traffic congestion and widening projects have been an ongoing issue for 27th Street, with the city wanting to widen the street’s belt as it took on more traffic with growth in population and development.

While Country Club residents won their battle to keep the city from widening the street, other neighborhoods — including Woods Park — tried and lost.

Some people think of the Country Club neighborhood as Lincoln’s little Dutch boy with his finger in the dam. Or the pinch in the hourglass that keeps the sand from running through too fast.

Realtor and Country Club resident Linda Wibbels said the area has lots of history, and widening 27th to four or five lanes would ruin its feel  just to save Lincoln residents a few minutes of drive time.

“It still has the flavor of a neighborhood street,” she said, “with people walking and walking their dogs … and neighbors visiting across the street.“

But others outside the nearly 100-year-old neighborhood think its residents have gotten their way because they have higher incomes — many of them, especially those south of Van Dorn, make more than $100,000 a year — more influence and are predominantly white. According to census reports, very few people of color live between South Street and Nebraska 2.

Most Country Club-area houses are owner-occupied, and many of the residents hold undergraduate and graduate or professional degrees.

Many of the city’s immigrant population and people of color live north of O Street along 27th, in the Hartley, Clinton and Malone neighborhoods.

Latinos, blacks and Native Americans also live in higher numbers in the Woods Park neighborhood just south of O street, according to the 2000 Census. Many foreign-born residents live along 27th north of A Street and south of Nebraska 2.

Immigrant-owned businesses have opened along the street between O and Cornhusker Highway. They include restaurants, markets,  clothing and convenience stores.

But demand for their goods and services is growing to the south, too.

Ali Al-Basam owns Sinbad’s Restaurant at 27th and Orchard. The restaurant serves fish, hummous, falafel, chicken and beef kabobs and baklava.

Sinbad’s has been open five years, and business is not bad, Al-Basam said, but a south location would be better.

This fall, Vietnamese businessman Andrew Vuong closed up his North 27th Street store and moved south, a block southeast of Nebraska 2 and 48th Street, to get closer to his most loyal clientele.

Besides the many restaurants and box stores, 27th has lured Lincoln car dealerships that have moved from more central locations to the street’s far reaches — north and south. They hope to maximize the strength of numbers and to stretch out, modernize and be more accessible to regional car buyers.

Some people tease the Williamson Honda staff, saying a trip to the dealership feels like a trip to Kansas. But they moved south, more than six miles from O Street, because the area is developing rapidly, and 27th had land to put all their cars and services in one place,  salesman Larry Ellerbeck said. The dealership’s new service center has 42 work bays.

Since Yankee Hill Road has opened, Ellerbeck said, they are seeing a ton of traffic, both in the morning and evening.

“The thing about this out here, so many things are going on, it’s kind of exciting,” he said.

The downtown Williamson’s was a destination store, he said. Customers came in solely to talk about buying a car. Out south, he said, many are “tire kickers,” who frequently turn into buyers.

Just to the south of Williamson’s on the northeast corner of 27th and Yankee Hill, developers of Wilderness Hills lifestyle center, an open-air, upscale retail shopping and entertainment center, have put in a large waterfall, pond and landscaping.

Now they are working on signing contracts with national retail and restaurant tenants, said Karon Hansen with CB Richard Ellis/Mega. The streets and utilities are in, and they are ready to begin construction in the spring, she said, when they hope to get businesses’ commitment to building in Lincoln.

“We are seriously talking to a couple dozen possibilities.”

So while the 27th Street transformation may seem like overnight, if we’d been paying attention, we would have seen that it’s been more of a steady process.

Still, it is the North 27th changes that have most changed Lincoln’s identity, taken it far enough to touch the world whirring by on Interstate 80.

Since the 27th Street interchange opened in 1993, development from the Super Saver on Cornhusker to the U-Stop just south of the Interstate has boomed.

Who knows what lies beyond?

Reach JoAnne Young @473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.