The city's old police station, 233 S. 10th St., is being retired from local government service, and it's getting pretty lonely inside the squat, art deco building.Ìý
The state child-support collection offices moved out in June.ÌýÂ
Aging Partners, which had a fitness center and some offices in the building, recently moved to Ninth and J streets, where adult probation most recently had offices.Ìý
Informational Services will be gone by the end of summer, to new offices at the city’s mammoth Municipal Services Center, the old Experian building.
The Lincoln-Lancaster County Emergency Management Agency will likely move into unused space at the Lancaster County Youth Services Center, 1200 Radcliffe Road, by the end of the year.
That will leave the building vacant and ready to be sold.
People are also reading…
The city has said it would like to see that block redeveloped, and a first step was getting the aging 233 Building emptied and ready for sale.Ìý
Pregnant mares' urine once distilled there
As the city moves toward selling the old police station, a few historic stories will certainly get retold.Ìý
This is an excerpt from a 2017 article by former reporter Nicholas Bergin:
"The area has a colorful past. It’s been home to a livery stable, cigar manufacturer, brothel, auto stores and a gay bar — The Q.
"The 233 Building, which gets its name from its address, 233 S. 10th St., was constructed in 1917 by the Smith-Dorsey Chemists. They paid $4,000 for the empty lot to build on and expanded in 1925, buying up the adjacent properties of Lincoln Welding and Barlow Harness Shop. The company built a third addition in 1940.
"During the 1940s, the chemists extracted estrogen from pregnant mares' urine, which meant boiling large quantities of raw material. The basement distillation was vented into an alley, filling the neighborhood with the stench of urine. On one occasion, according to local accounts, a truck carrying race horses drove past on the way to the fairgrounds and all hell broke loose with stallions nearly destroying the truck.
"The pharmaceutical company has since moved and is now part of , which has an over-the-counter drug-manufacturing plant at 10401 Cornhusker Highway."Â
Take a ride in a driverless car
Lincoln residents will be able to see a driverless vehicle in action in June, when the city brings in a demonstration shuttle.
As part of a $100,000 grant, city staff have to offer a demonstration, or mini-version of a pilot project.Ìý
The vehicle would likely have a short, preprogrammed route at either Innovation Campus on the old state fairgrounds, or in the Haymarket, with the other traffic shut down.
The details haven't been worked out yet, but it will be a taste of the future, said Lonnie Burklund, assistant director for Public Works and Utilities.
The demonstration is part of the city staff effort to get even more money through the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge.ÌýThat grant submission is due in August and city staff will hear back in October.Ìý
Flags sprouting for construction season
It’s spring, and the red, yellow and orange flags are sprouting in yards around Lincoln as Allo and other utility companies begin their spring construction work.
For those fastidious folks who have trouble tolerating all those tiny flags waving in their lawn, you can remove them after a proper wait. The locate flags are good for only 10 days. Then the locate company must come do its job again.
But David Young, infrastructure manager for the city, recommends giving the companies 14 days to do their work, or not, before removal.
And once the digging work is done, there is no longer any need for those flags, even though the company doing the excavation might not remove them.
Bike share program at full speed
If you become a member of Lincoln’s bike-share program, you can use that membership in 40 other BCycle programs across the country.
That reciprocity agreement is particularly beneficial here because BCycle runs both the Omaha and Lincoln programs, said David Cary, the city’s planning department director.
So your Lincoln membership is good for the bikes in Omaha and also in Kansas City, Missouri; Denver and Des Moines, Iowa.
Lincoln’s new bike-share program has two additional stations on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campuses, and all 100 bikes are now on the street and available for rent.
The city had held off putting 59 of the bikes into circulation, in order to make absolutely sure there was no problem with a federal grant that helped pay for the other bikes.
The city wanted to make sure the 41 bikes purchased with federal funds were paid for and the federal paperwork closed out before Lincoln began using the rest of the bikes, which were sitting in the basement of the Municipal Services Center.Ìý
During the first three weeks, BikeLNK users have taken more than 1,370 trips. They've biked more than 4,000 miles, burned more than 175,000 calories and helped offset their carbon footprint, according to the April report from BCycle.
Buying ice makers for the arena
The Pinnacle Bank Arena is buying five new ice machines, in part because the original building did not have soft-water service.
The West Haymarket Joint Public Agency approved the $23,700Â purchase of five new ice machines, and Jane Kinsey, with Watchdogs of Lincoln Government, wanted to know why the machines needed to be replaced just five years after the building opened.Ìý
Tom Lorenz, arena manager, said the building did not originally have water-softener equipment and the machines got calcium buildup on their coils.Ìý
The options were to replace the coils or replace the machines. With a new machine, you get a five-year warranty, he said.
The arena was built without water-softener equipment because of value engineering used during construction, Lorenz said in response to Kinsey's questions.Ìý
Value engineering is part of the process, he said. "I wish I had the power to do it individually, but it was part of the contractor's process."
The arena installed soft-water equipment about a year after it opened, Lorenz said.Ìý
He expects the new machines to last longer than the original ones.Ìý
Reach the writer at 402-473-7250 or nhicks@journalstar.com.Ìý
On Twitter . Reporter Peter Salter contributed to this story.