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Web-Only Feature: Obama stumbled on Lincoln's charity trail |
IT IS AUTUMN IN LINCOLN, or is it springtime in Paris?
We turn left onto this grand boulevard from where some of the grandest neighborhoods in the city flow like gentle streams. And as we roll past majestic trees that stand tall and strong on a land once filled with prairie, we are now driving inside a giant postcard. Children playfully prance home from school on serene streets greeted by heavenly hedges, immense gardens and lush lawns, which lead to historic homes of stone and brick, and of course, wood. Two Woodses: Frank and Mark.
It was more than a century ago that the Woods brothers had a vision for much of these 500 acres just a couple of miles southeast of downtown Lincoln. It is now known as the Boulevards Historic District, but when these guys from Chicago stared out across this farm ground, they saw their own Land of Oz.
“They were great promoters, but they also had a really big idea,” said Ed Zimmer, the historic preservation planner for Lincoln and Lancaster County. “They envisioned this grand boulevard going all the way from Lincoln to the next little town, which at that time was called College View. With that big vision, it takes off, and they build the finest houses in town.”
Frank and Mark Woods moved from Chicago in the 1880s when their father decided he could make more noise as an auctioneer in this boom town of Lincoln, which suddenly had quadrupled in size, exploding in growth because of the railroad. The other brother, George, got into the act, and the young Woods men started wheeling and dealing. They imported stallions and European draft horses, sold tractors, repaired the riverbank, started a phone company, and then they dug into the real estate business.
Soon after the century turned, the wheels started turning inside the business minds of Frank and Mark. They bought up patches of the prairie and dreamt of greener pastures, not just for their investment but to provide a better living environment for Lincoln families. They had visions of innovative modern lots, with homes set back from brick-paved streets, surrounded by a landscape canvas of quaint sidewalks and wonder walls of trees and shrubs.
The Woods brothers wanted their developments built with complete water and sewer systems. They also planned for a street car running on their “Broadway,” the spectacular Sheridan Boulevard. From Sheridan, they wanted side streets to curve with the natural flow of the land, instead of from lines drawn on a map.
Zimmer is an architectural historian, but he is also the wonderful wizard of this district. His research spanning 15 years ended with an 80-page nomination paper that earned the district a home in the National Register of Historic Places in 2008. Zimmer supervised the photography of the 1,200 homes in the district built before 1958, and those pictures captured ideas these brothers planted on this Nebraska land.
“That’s one reason we call it the Boulevards District,” Zimmer said. “It’s got lovely, curving streets with great expansive right-of-ways, with the trees and hedges, plantings and the houses sort of arching along these beautiful streets. It was the first area in Lincoln that the layout of the streets responded to the shape of the land, rather than just treating everything like it’s flat and drawing straight lines on it.”
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Those side streets were the master strokes of this building mural. Frank and Mark wanted their own dream houses. They wanted wealthy buyers to invest $10,000 for homes built on Sheridan Boulevard. But their plan also made room for common folks on the affordable side streets, where it was $4,000 for a housing lot.
The Woods Brothers were rolling the dice on their real-life Monopoly board. They only owned a slice of ground near South Street, so the Woods pitched housing deals to land owners parcel by parcel and got each one to help extend the boulevard two miles by offering free trolley rides on the wide grassy median. The brothers sung out about the housing lots with free band concerts and bold advertisements in the Sunday newspaper. And big signs would trumpet a final warning at the concerts to prospective buyers: This is your last chance. Then the next concert would always bring another last chance. The following ad by the Woods’ from 1909 was published in Zimmer’s report.
“Homes for the poor as well as the rich,” read the ad. “We have many beautiful lots in this addition that we are offering to the young men and the young women who are fighting and saving for a home.”
In 1950, six years before his death, Mark Woods gave an interview to the Lincoln Journal, and he looked back to when the dream broke ground in 1909.
“I felt the development of modern residential lots with shrubbery planned and set back, and building-cost restrictions would pay us for the effort as well as beautify Lincoln,” Mark Woods recalled, remembering also their trolley that ran until World War II ended.
Frank Woods, the visionary behind Lincoln’s historic Boulevards District, had his hand in a lot more than home building. Click here to learn how his industrious spirit set the stage for a modern controversy of presidential proportion.
