My Omaha Obsession: Searching for the City - Paperback

by Cassette (Author), Chris Ware (Foreword by)

2021 Nebraska Book Award

My Omaha Obsession takes the reader on an idiosyncratic tour through some of Omaha's neighborhoods, buildings, architecture, and people, celebrating the city's unusual history. Rather than covering the city's best-known sites, Miss Cassette is irresistibly drawn to strange little buildings and glorious large homes that don't exist anymore as well as to stories of Harkert's Holsum Hamburgers and the Twenties Club.

Piecing together the records of buildings and homes and everything interesting that came after, Miss Cassette shares her observations of the property and its significance to Omaha. She scrutinizes land deeds, insurance maps, tax records, and old newspaper articles to uncover a property's singular story. Through conversations with fellow detectives and history enthusiasts, she guides readers along her path of hunches, personal interests, mishaps, and more.

As a longtime resident of Omaha, Miss Cassette is informed by memories of her youth combined with an enduring curiosity about the city's offbeat relics and remains. Part memoir and part research guide with a healthy dose of colorful wandering, My Omaha Obsession celebrates the historic built environment and searches for the people who shaped early Omaha.

Author Biography

Miss Cassette is the writer, researcher, and amateur gumshoe of the website myomahaobsession.com. Her writing has appeared in Omaha Magazine. Chris Ware is a writer, artist, and native of Omaha. He is the author of Building Stories and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and has contributed graphic fiction and more than twenty-five covers to the New Yorker.