Some buildings in Nebraska give away nothing from the sidewalk. Brick, tall windows, a loading dock that hasn’t loaded anything in decades.
Then you pull the door open and there’s a furnace roaring at a temperature hotter than lava, a potter elbow-deep in clay, and three floors of studios stacked above you. What used to roll mattresses off an assembly line now turns out glass, bronze, oil paintings, and the occasional handmade violin.
A Brick Factory on Nicholas Street
North of Omaha’s Old Market, past the rail lines and the newer downtown construction, a broad brick factory takes up most of a block. Three floors, big industrial windows, the kind of solid early-1900s construction that was built to hold heavy machinery and never quite stopped being useful.
Inside, the layout still reads like a factory floor. Wide corridors, concrete and timber, doorways opening into more than fifty studios where roughly ninety resident artists work…