Lakeside living has never been more in vogue around Omaha.
Just look at the luxury developments west of the city. Million-dollar homes on the shores of what had been sand and gravel pits, or creeks dammed for man-made lakes.
But you might not believe that the first try at making a lake the focal point of a housing subdivision, and not a public park, was just blocks south of Fontenelle Park. Or that there was a lake across Underwood Avenue from Memorial Park.
Time to take a swim through Omaha’s lake history.
It’s long dried up, but there was a lake in Lake James Park at 49th Street and Bedford Avenue. In fact, a 1906 ad said there were two. Artesian springs were the water supply. The developer was Charles Williamson, who named the lake for his son. His daughter, Gretchen, had to settle for a street named for her.
People are also reading…
The first day the 188 lots were put on the market, four teams of horses were moving dirt for the dam that was to hold back the 2½-acre lake. The state fish commission stocked the lake with crappie in 1908. But by the 1920s, the fishing — and the lake — went away. By 1936, the city was using the lake beds as greenspace.
George’s Lake — or Lake George — was formed in 1915. Brothers and Realtors C.C. and J.E. George dammed Wood Creek north of Underwood for a lake 1,200-feet long and 200-feet wide. It was 30-feet to the bottom of the flooded ravine. J.E. George Boulevard ran along the lake’s east side.
After World War II, a never-built Elmwood Parkway linking the Benson neighborhood to Memorial Park would have run on either side of the lake. When the land was sold in 1952 for the Dillon’s Fairacres Addition, a World-Herald article said the lake was shrinking from silt and sewage was floating in it. The deepest part of the lake wasn’t platted for another nine years.
Seymour Lake was made in 1891 for Dr. George L. Miller, the founder of the Omaha World (a predecessor to The World-Herald), next to his Seymour Park estate and subdivision that would become Ralston 20 years later. In the summer, it was a recreation area and, in winter, a place for South Omaha meat packers to get their ice. Starting in the 1910s, a country club golf course bordered the southwest shore.
The lake, 45 acres at its largest, was a reason 72nd Street wasn’t cut through from L Street to Ralston’s Main Street until 1944. During the winter of 1951-52, Seymour Lake dried up.
Carter Lake Club was the first housing development on the lake — originally named Cutoff Lake since the Missouri River flood of 1877 left 4½ miles of Saratoga Bend landlocked on the Nebraska side. The club was formed in 1912 by members of the Omaha Rod and Gun Club who had first crack at 150 of the 200 available lots in the lake’s horseshoe that were used primarily for summer cottages.
For more year-round living was Wavecrest, on the west shore of the east arm of Carter Lake and east of Carter Lake Club. Started in 1917 by Jesse L. Hiatt and O.C. Redick, Wavecrest was in the hands of the Byron Reed Company by 1924.
North of Carter Lake was Florence Lake, another cutoff remnant from the Missouri River that greeted the founders of Nebraska. It’s shown on the earliest territorial maps. Gustave Sesemann opened a hotel on the crescent-shaped lake in 1889. The amenities included a dancing pavilion, restaurant, bar, bowling alley and rifle range. A rival was Hill’s Roadhouse, said to be “taboo to most people of Omaha” but lasted into the 1920s. Florence Lake was gone by the early 1930s.
In the 1960s came a resurgence in year-round lake living with Riverside Lakes, Lake Candlewood and Ginger Cove.
Riverside Lakes south of Waterloo was designed for most of its 300 lots to access a boating lake or a fishing lake. Gentry Davis and James Carpenter, the developers, had the housing lots built up from the dredging of the lakes. The elevation was said to be 10 feet about the water level reached during the 1944 Elkhorn River flood. During the March 2019 flood, perhaps the worst in the subsequent 75 years, the homes were safe but the 228th Street access was washed out.
Lake Candlewood was formed by the first private dam in the Papillion Creek watershed following the deadly floods of 1964 and 1965. Ninety of the 350 lots were near the lake. Built in a like manner was Bennington Lake for the Newport Landing development. Those are the only two of the original 21 dams and reservoirs proposed in the 1960s for the watershed to have lakefront homes.
Ginger Cove was Douglas County’s first lake community built from a sandpit. It was started in 1967. The 205 acres, including the 93-acre lake, had been part of Ray’s Valley Lakes. The latter was a privately owned recreation area operated by Ray Villareal that opened in 1948.
There was one more lake built during that time. And the time for Lonergan Lake, northwest of 72nd and McKinley Streets, to be developed may be soon.
The project in 1967 had received the first Federal Housing Authority Title X-insured loan granted to a residential lake development, then ownership changed hands several times. ConAgra, which bought the land in the 1980s for possible use as its campus, but ended up downtown in the Jobber’s Canyon footprint, sold 569 acres in 2020 to Omaha luxury-home developer Curt Hofer for $3.4 million.