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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.