In the new season of Nebraska Stories, a long-lost photo captures Lincoln’s everyday life before the rise of car culture reshaped the city.
Five billion. That’s the number of photographs humans take every day in the second decade of the 21st century. Former Nebraska Public Media producer Christine Lesiak thinks anything that common lacks mystery, but it was different in the last century.
Last summer an image in a downtown Lincoln restaurant pulled the past into the present. “It gave me an uncanny feeling,” she said. “As if I could step into it, like a kind of time machine.”
The photo – dated May 31, 1931 – revealed the minutiae of life and a moment in history captured for the 17th season of Nebraska Stories.
A drugstore soda fountain. Aunt Betty's bread. The Strand theater. Men and women rushing across the street with umbrellas drawn against the rain.
In the premiere episode, Lesiak meets with architect Bob Ripley to decode the 90-year-old scene and what it reveals about a city once shaped by pedestrians instead of cars.
Ripley walks through landmarks like the Stuart Building and Miller and Paine department store, beloved for its Tea Room and cinnamon rolls, and the people who filled the fabled “O” Street corridor – a street poet Allen Ginsberg famously dubbed Zero Street in 1966.
Watch this story and more on Nebraska Stories Thursdays beginning Jan. 15 at 8 p.m. CT on Nebraska Public Media & the PBS app.