Dundee Village: Omaha's Happy Hollow NeighborhoodOne of Omaha's most distinctive neighboorhoods began as a suburb with Story by Molly Garriott |
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A DRIVE DOWN TREE-LINED STREETS of Omaha’s mid-town Dundee Village reveals inherent charm: stately English Tudors keep company with Spanish-style stucco homes; and clapboard colonials hobnob with Georgian bricks. Every once in a while, a renegade one-story ranch asserts itself between its three-storied neighbors. These dwellings are home to college professors and college students, young families and empty nesters, politicians and professionals, teachers and tradesmen.
What Dundee’s residents have in common is a sense of belonging and a desire to put down roots here. Take Dan Rock, whose childhood was spent blanketing the streets of Dundee by bicycle and who, these days, marches in the Dundee Days Parade as den master for his son’s Cub Scout Pack. His memories revolve around Dundee Elementary, the same school his son now attends. Most of all, he remembers its old bell – and he does mean “old.” In 2004, the school celebrated its 100th anniversary.
The bell’s rope actually dropped through the principal’s office ceiling, Rock said, and the student of the day would dismiss their schoolmates with one lucky tug. After 15 years of silence, repairs to the bell have the icon of Rock’s alma mater in working order once again.
Ironically, this established neighborhood, so far removed from the cookie cutter subdivisions of suburbia, was just that – an early suburban subdivision. In 1870, prominent Omahan John Nelson Hayes Patrick built a 33-room mansion he called Happy Hollow on 800 acres west of the young river city. It was that estate, bordered by 48th Street on the east, 69th on the west, extending to Dodge Street to the south and stretching as far north as Hamilton, which would grow into the present Dundee-Memorial Park neighborhood.
Hoping to develop the surrounding area by cashing in on the economic prosperity of the 1880s, Patrick hired developers to construct six homes just east of his mansion, between what would become Capitol and California streets and 48th and 52nd streets. The neighborhood was dubbed “Dundee Place” after Dundee, Scotland.
People did not flock to the outer reaches of the city, however. The perception that it lay too far west coupled with the Panic of 1893 and the following economic depression seemed to doom the development. It took a group of tenacious businessmen, convinced of the area’s worth, to entice buyers with free lots and $500 bonuses if buyers built and remained for a year.
They created curb appeal by planting more than 2,000 maple trees which continue to shade the neighborhood’s streets today. They built a cottage destined to serve triple duty as church, school and meeting house. Sidewalks, originally laid out with boards, were updated and decorated with street lights. In 1915, more than 35 years after Patrick first broke ground on his mansion, the city of Omaha annexed Dundee Village.
Also in 1915, Buffett & Sons Groceries opened as Dundee’s first store along what is now the bustling Underwood Avenue business strip. Seeing as how the store was owned by his grandfather, a young Warren Buffett was a shoo-in to the business and spent his teen years making deliveries and sweeping floors. It is rumored that Buffett, in those formative years, would purchase a six-pack of sodas for a quarter which he, in turn, sold individually for a nickel on hot summer days.
Fittingly, the grocery store where Buffett’s legendary $.05 profit marked the beginning of his billion dollar investment career is now the site of Dundee Bank.
Today, Dundee is a place that is unfettered by privacy fences. Homeowners have front porches and use them.
Tim and Diane McDonald have been Dundee residents for nearly 30 years, but it is only in the last few that Tim has established himself as a beer-brewing master, according to neighbors, the main beneficiaries of Tim’s hobby. Robert Frost once asserted that “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Tim’s motto is “Good beer makes a good neighbor, or an excess of it makes a rotten neighbor tolerable,” he said.
Across the street from the McDonalds are Paul and Caunsery Rasmussen. A pair of Dundee’s newest residents, the Rasmussen’s are here because Paul is serving a three-year tour of duty at Strategic Air Command in Bellevue. Originally from California, Caunsery is captivated by the sense of community that she and her husband have encountered in Dundee.
“I feel like I’m living in the 1950s,” she said, marveling at children being summoned to the dinner table with calls from front porches.
The Rasmussens enter into the spirit of it all when they pull their portable fireplace to their front yard to host S’mores parties. Neighbors amble over with their contributions in hand – pie, a bottle of wine, an extra bag of marshmallows. Even more popular are the times that Paul projects movies onto his white, clapboard garage, giving pajama-clad neighborhood children opportunity to munch popcorn under the stars.