Seeing Lincoln

No. 1—O street

Come with us, all you who are new to the city or you who bid fair to live and die in Lincoln without ever having seen her various faces. We’ll teach you in—well, we don’t know how many lessons—something about the city in which you are living.

Maybe we should begin with the capitol, known over the world for its beauty. But we think we’ll start with that handy starting and stopping place, O street. Lincoln is often described as an overgrown country town, O its Main street. But even New York has its lapses into the primitive, and who doesn’t like, in medium doses, the simplicity and the friendliness that spell country town.

When Lincoln was only a handful of blocks flung down on the prairie for hasty habitation by early salt seekers, restless young Civil war veterans, the railroad advance guard and those with an incurable pioneer fever, it huddled within the confines of what is now the most downtown part of Lincoln. Along O from Eighth to Fourteenth were its beginnings. The town spread slowly, like extremely cold molasses, into an indefinite shape with an undulating circumference at the present time of about 20 miles.

So, here’s O street, looking from Tenth east. Most of Lincoln’s buses head up O to Tenth, rolling around government square and then rolling back to O again. You can’t get lost in Lincoln. Just keep one foot, or at least an eye, on O and say your alphabet north and south. Or on Thirteenth and say your numbers east and west. And then there are a few streets on the edges with fancier names, just to make it a little harder.