The Old Market and the Brick Streets

The Old Market occupies several blocks of downtown Omaha, bordered by Tenth Street to the east and Farnam Street to the north. The buildings are Victorian and Edwardian brick, four and five stories, built during the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties when Omaha's wholesale jobbing industry was booming. Produce dealers, dry goods wholesalers, and commission merchants moved through these warehouses and loading docks. The streets were paved in brick that remains underfoot today.

By the nineteen fifties the neighborhood was in collapse. The grocery distribution system had modernized, the wholesale trade had scattered to the suburbs, and the buildings were empty and deteriorating. Many of the buildings stood in danger of being lost.

Sam Mercer, a preservationist who acquired a collection of the old red-brick warehouses, decided to do something unexpected. Beginning in the late nineteen sixties, he began renovating the buildings not as commercial warehouses but as mixed-use spaces for retail, galleries, and restaurants. He started acquiring neighboring properties and repeating the process.

The French Café opened in the district in the late nineteen sixties and is widely credited as the catalyst that made the whole experiment credible. Other tenants followed. By the nineteen eighties the Old Market had become the kind of neighborhood that other American cities were trying to replicate: preserved historic fabric adapted for contemporary use, walkable streets, ground-floor commerce, residential lofts above.

The district is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains one of Omaha's primary gathering spaces. The brick streets are still there, slightly uneven underfoot, slowing everyone down to the pace of the nineteenth century.