For the first time on this trip, we spent the long weekend in a place that neither of us had heard much about: Omaha, Nebraska. A vague recollection, somehow associating the place with emo/scene music, was confirmed by The Oracle of Omaha (ChatGPT, not Warren Buffett) which confirmed that this city birthed 2000s indie stalwarts Bright Eyes and Cursive. Somehow, their earnest vibes make sense here, though the city is a lot less depressing than Conor Oberst's lyrics.
Driving in, you see the unmistakable vistas of the Great Plains, mostly empty except for huge circular bales of hay dotting the gentle hillsides. It looks like a giant dumped a bag of enormous Werther's Originals all over the place. Apparently, these hay bales can be worth about $100 a piece, so it's surprising that they're all just left out in the open like that! One outlaw with a 50-boxcar train could come through and make a killing.
By chance, we'd picked a great weekend to visit. The first night, we heard about a community festival called BFF, centered in the Benson neighborhood and focused on the arts and music. Half the city had come out, and it seemed like each corner was competing for the loudest sound system: country, regional Mexican, and afrobeats were all well represented. Maybe Bright Eyes would have been too much of a buzzkill? Artists of all kinds were hosting open galleries, and there was a range of characters in attendance. We met a small crew who were transforming a school bus into a home base for doing graffiti, a UNO student making resin art, and a calypso band performing for an audience of about fifteen people.
The next day, Open Omaha was in full force. An event focused on opening up private spaces/businesses to the public, we were lucky enough to see both old Omaha (the Joslyn Mansion) and new Omaha (Yates Illuminates) in one day. The mansion's namesake, George Joslyn, moved to Omaha from Vermont in the 1870s and quickly established himself as the country's largest supplier of readyprint, sheets of newsprint pre-filled with national news on one side and then shipped far and wide for local papers to print the more parochial stuff on the other. His readyprint sheets reached over 70% of Americans in the early 1900s, three times Twitter's reach! With his massive fortune, George Joslyn decided to build a Scottish Baronial house (basically a castle), for $250K that you can get a glimpse of, now comically out of place in the neighborhood. It makes you wonder if today's business leaders are as interested in the tangible: will we get to actually step on the red rock hardscaping of Elon's first Mars Colony, or will we have to settle for the metaverse?
Yates Illuminates bridged the gap from Omaha's past to its present. A coalition of over a dozen nonprofits came together to save a hulking public school from demolition, and the building now houses programming for students, new Americans, elders, and more. Writing, cooking, art, and tech all coexist here, free for anybody who wants to take part. Wandering the halls of Yates, we bumped into a fellow Jesuit school grad and learned about Omaha By Design, an organization shaping Omaha's future through proactive urban design and experimental initiatives. She talked about engaged citizens racking up wins and improving the city, highlighting an e-bike share program that would make a blue state jealous ($20 per month for unlimited rides!), but admitted that even the most hardened bike commuters hibernate during the Midwest winter. Don't feel too bad though; there's plenty of Omaha steak and German beer to help locals ride out the cold and gear up for their next urban infrastructure push.
On the way out, driving through Western Iowa towards Chicago, the golden hay bales reappeared on the horizon. Again marveling that there were hundreds just left out in the fields to dry without so much as a fence for security, we speculated that you could trade in a few hundred of them for a house in Omaha. Whoa, not quite! We were an order of magnitude off-base: they're worth $100 each, not $1000. Nevertheless, rustling up 1,900 bales doesn't seem like too tough a way to afford the average house in Omaha. Or grab a few more and get yourself a mansion! Not bad at all from a Californian vantage point.