Capital City on the Prairie
Industrious residents of Lincoln, Nebraska
credit sturdy forefathers
with turning a prairie-grass outpost into a thriving green zone.
with turning a prairie-grass outpost into a thriving green zone.
Warning to newcomers: Beware of the
“scarlet fever” that rages through Lincoln on many
fall Saturdays. Its epicenter is Memorial Stadium at the University of Nebraska, where diehard football fans, swathed in red, cheer
on the perennial champion Cornhuskers. By game time, the 77,000
“residents” make Memorial Stadium the state’s
third most populated area.
The Big Red gatherings
have been defining events in Lincoln— and the whole
state—since at least the 1920s, when the team first hit
national charts. But it was in the 1960s that supercoaches Bob
Devaney and Tom Osborne stoked the red fever to pandemic
proportions. All 268 games since 1962 have been sellouts.
New physicians in town
might feel they’d be left out of the revelry, but not to
worry. “You may have to inherit the season tickets, but
businesses buy them and other people do share them with
you,” says Bob Bleicher, MD. “Or, if you just go to
a game and look around you’ll find people hawking them. I
know someone who says there’s not a time when he
couldn’t get two to four tickets that way.”
Besides, adds family
practitioner Dale Michels, MD, “Obstetrics is part of my
practice, and it’s not a good idea to go to a game when
you’re on call.” Michels says he “enjoys but
doesn’t die for” football, and occasionally joins
the stadium crowd.
Luckily, there are other
sports in town, including Bleicher’s favorites—
Junior A hockey and soccer. And in summer, baseball fans can
watch the Saltdogs, an
independent team organized in 2001, filling a 40-year void in
post-college hardball.
Other Lincolnites dream of
winter for skating and cross-country skiing. Not even
Lincoln’s lack of hills can discourage sledding
enthusiasts. “We create our own hills,” says Wendy
Birdsall, the president of the Convention
and Visitors Bureau. For
example, sledders often glide down the curved side of a dam
built on Salt Creek to control the flooding that once plagued
the city. Salt, Oak, and Antelope Creeks are the closest things
to rivers anywhere near Lincoln.
Forcing success
This lack of rivers and hills was among
the factors that led many people to believe the city had little
chance of thriving. In fact, when Lincoln became the capital of
the newly established state, diehards in Omaha, which had been
the territorial capital, gloated that the town had “no
river, no railroad, no steam wagon, nothing.” Heaping on
more scorn, the Omaha Republic predicted: “Nobody
will ever go to Lincoln who does not go to the legislature, the
lunatic asylum, the penitentiary, or some of the state
institutions.”
Although there was
some logic to the statement, the writer turned out to be wrong.
“There isn’t any reason for that city to be
there,” agrees former Chamber of Commerce president Paul
McCue. A capital city should be in the middle of the state, and
Lincoln is a short 60 miles from Omaha, which hugs the eastern
border. But in the 1860s, it was the last outpost before the
western “desert,” an area that the pundits thought,
wrongly again, would never be settled.
Lincoln, whose
population is edging toward a quarter of a million, has
recently captured such magazine accolades as 20th best city for
families, fourth best place in the U.S. (of 329 metro areas)
for business and careers, and “five-star quality of
life” metro area. Its businesses include at least 20
large insurance companies and some 200 manufacturers, among
them two Fortune 100 corporations. One of its large employers
is none other than the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, a
final consolidation of at least five lines that came into
Lincoln starting in 1870.
Despite proximity to Omaha,
with its cutting-edge hospitals, Lincoln has become a regional
medical destination in its own right, complete with two major
medical centers, a new heart hospital, and a psychiatric
hospital. Plus there is Madonna
Rehabilitation Hospital, with a
unique range of services from state-of-the-art physical rehab
to nationally recognized research projects and a prevention and
wellness agenda. Coming in 2006: Lincoln’s first
medically-based fitness center.
Lincolnites are proud
of their “state-of-the-art” downtown, too.
“It’s a wonderful, lively place,” says McCue,
who now lives in Florida. He was surprised on a recent visit to
discover that “it’s hard to get a restaurant
reservation,” even on weeknights.
When, as in other
cities, traditional shopping fled to suburban malls,
Lincoln’s downtown stayed alive as a business and
financial district. Beautification efforts began in 1979 when
Centrum, a former downtown mall, opened and the streets were
punctuated with benches, fountains, kiosks and trees. Based on
that and several other factors, Harper’s Magazine named
it the “Number One American City for Liveability”
that year.
The resuscitation of Historic Haymarket Square, a multi-block area where farmers and merchants once
peddled their products, spiced up the downtown entertainment
scene. In the 1990s, warehouses were converted to galleries,
specialty shops, and restaurants. Among the popular and unusual
eateries in the district are the FireWorks Restaurant, where all the cooking is wood-fired, Lazlo’s
Brewery & Grill
(Nebraska’s first brewery), and Baciami, a
tapas bistro.
Lincoln has other unique
dining options as well. If the football hex is still on you,
you can make an end run to Bob’s
Gridiron Grille and Pigskin Pub,
where there’s a 20,000-item collection of Cornhusker
memorabilia.
Friendly, generous, and modest
A neurosurgeon who grew up in northeast
Nebraska and educated in larger cities, Pierson appreciates
both his patients and colleagues in Lincoln. “It’s
a nice population,” he says. “The patients are
enjoyable to work with. Families generally comprehend what
we’re trying to do, and there are good, skilled
nurses.” Pierson received his medical degree from
Columbia University and completed residency at the University
of Minnesota - Minneapolis and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester
before going into practice in Lincoln in 1978. Of his
affiliation with Saint Elizabeth Regional Medical Center, he
says that, in an environment where doctors, nurses, and
technicians depend heavily on each other, “we’re
seldom disappointed.”
DuWayne Carlson, MD arrived
in Lincoln last October to take charge of the orthopaedic
trauma center at BryanLGH
Medical Center, a two-hospital
complex resulting from a 1996 merger. (The LGH stands for
Lincoln General Hospital.) Although he attended Union College,
a small Lincoln institution, and his wife is a Lincoln native,
his education took him to California for a medical degree,
Chicago for residency, and practices in Indianapolis and
Phoenix. “I got burned out,” he admits, and started
looking for another position, preferably in a smaller
Midwestern city.
“A consulting
firm for trauma physicians gave me two choices,” says
Carlson. “One was Lincoln. We asked for divine guidance,
and this is where we settled. It’s big enough to warrant
someone with my specialty, but not so big as to have much crime
and other big-city problems.”
Carlson’s
previous experience may have given him a perspective that
long-time residents don’t have. “I’ve worked
in enough (other places) that I would say the network among
employees at BryanLGH is fairly tight and more like
family,” he says.
Barbara Keating, the
research director at the Convention and Visitors Bureau, moved
to Lincoln five years ago and is charmed by the friendliness of
the whole city. “If somebody’s in trouble, (the
neighbors) are right there,” she says.
Carlson attributes the
atmosphere to “Midwestern hardworking attitudes and
conservative values,” traits often credited to
Nebraskans, as well as friendliness, stoicism, generosity,
stubbornness, and modesty. Historian Dorothy Weyer Creigh
writes that the traits are legacies from late 19th-century
Czech and German immigrants. Along with other pioneers, they
realized that, “no amount of bragging could bring forth
rain or stop the winds, and that work, rather than words, would
create the kind of life they wanted,” Creigh says.
Brain drain control
In spite of Lincoln’s amenities,
exodus for bigger markets has been a concern in the medical
community. “When I was growing up, the loss of talented
workers was a frequent topic in the state legislature,”
Pierson remembers. One reason keeping medical talent in Lincoln
was a problem was that the state university medical school is
in Omaha.
Things seem to be
changing now, he says, adding that he’ll take some credit
for “reversing the brain drain.” His practice now
includes two neurosurgeons and a physiatrist from New York, a
spinal orthopedist from Boston and an interventional
radiologist from Korea. County medical society statistics back
him up. In the last two years, some 25 percent of newly hired
physicians have come from outside the city, including
international practitioners.
These new arrivals surely
add to what Lincoln Arts Council director Deb Weber calls a “jammed”
downtown on the first Friday of every month. The special nights
are set aside for after-hours art walks, complete with food and
drink.
Weber proudly counts no
fewer than 65 arts organizations in the city, from small groups
like the Lincoln Irish Dancers to the 75-year-old Lincoln
Symphony.
Lincoln has recently become
one of America’s larger resettlement communities for
international refugees, prompting an innovative arts council
program called the New American Folk Art Project. It’s a way to help newcomers keep their
arts and musical traditions alive and to introduce them to
others through concerts, gallery showings, and other public
events.
A business-related
“brain retention” project spurred development of
the University of Nebraska Technology
Park in 1996. It marries
high-tech employers to high-tech university researchers and
graduates in an atmosphere conducive to creating new processes
and products. Today a once-vacant, 137-acre plot holds 18
companies and organizations with 745 employees. It’s a
North American engineering support center for two divisions of
Siemens AG, the multi-national medical systems firm, and the
financial/software nerve center for Cabela’s, the
sporting goods empire.
Startup biotech firms
are the park’s most promising ventures for the future,
says director Steve Frayser. “We take inventions from the
university and try to convert them into commercial
products.”
One poster child for the
park is GeneSeek,
founded by a U of N professor and a local entrepreneur. Today,
in a state dominated by agriculture and meat production,
it’s the U.S. leader in genetic screening for swine and
cattle. The USDA used GeneSeek to rapidly identify the origin
of the animal found with Mad Cow Disease last year. Another
promising group is the Nature Technology Corporation, whose work involves producing vectors used in
gene therapy and trying to create DNA vaccines.
