Map Geek 04: Omaha Vice Traditional Geocache
The WBs: Time to give up this one.
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
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The Map Geek series of geocaches is for all my fellow map nerds in the caching community. All will (hopefully) have fun finding the cache. Those of you who find the map oddities and fun facts appealing, please feel free to discuss that in your cache log, adding comments, corrections and opinions as you wish.
Container is hidden in the Sporting District. A nickel or dime may be necessary for legal parking. Use stealth.
1884 Map with Sporting District outline:
Step into the time machine. Set the dial back 100 years or so for downtown Omaha. That smell is not the massive stockyards to the south, but the stench of breathtaking crime and corruption. For decades Omaha was a "wide open" city, and the center of it all was an area called the "Sporting District."
I started with the familiar promotional map of downtown Omaha, and tried to imagine it being distributed in 1906. My apologies to the Chamber of Commerce.
Not only were these well-known locations part of the Sporting District, there were underground tunnels connecting them with the hotels!
DIAMOND GAMBLING HOUSE, 1312 Douglas St
MAE HOGAN'S BROTHEL, 16 & Jackson
FLATIRON BUILDING, 17 & St Mary's
The Flatiron was well-known as a "safe house" for gangsters on the run, especially in the 1920s and 1930s.
GAYETY THEATER, 1614 Harney St (right)
Once called the Burwood, the Gayety was an infamous burlesque theater which some Omahans tried to shut down for years.
BUDWEISER SALOON, 1409 Douglas St (left)
This saloon served as crime boss Tom Dennison's headquarters and private bank.
ANNA WILSON'S BROTHEL (below) / DAN ALLEN'S GAMBLING HOUSE, 912 Douglas St
"Queen of the Underworld" Anna Wilson ran a 25-room brothel here; at her death it was donated to the city and became the City Emergency Hospital. When the city took it over they removed the naked-lady porch columns, but left some of the racy interior artwork intact. You could use the dumbwaiter at nearby Dan Allen's to send items to the pawn shop floor and continue gambling.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Photos of Anna Wilson and Dan Allen are not available, but visit this cache and you can see their mutual resting place, complete with a large monument with columns meant to look like bedposts.
Tom Dennison (left) ran Omaha for decades as his own crime empire. The mayor and police were in his pocket, the city offices were filled with his family members and cronies, and most historians blame him for fomenting the infamous race riot and lynching of 1919.
James Dahlman (right), Omaha mayor, owed his many elected terms to Dennison's support and to tolerating Dennison's criminal activities. The "cowboy mayor" has a park named after him with this cache.
Not too much is known about Mae Hogan, but it's well-documented that she and Anna Wilson were well-known for their generosity and civic philanthropy. Hogan helped support the St. Joseph Hospital.
Sources: trutv.com, Omaha Public Library, Douglas County Historical Society, Omaha World-Herald (Aug 30 2006: "Omaha's Hidden History"), Wikipedia
The maps and charts used are either with publishing dates before 1922, public government maps or data charts of my own design.
For the truly map-obsessed, there's information about the map sources (and tools used to create the new maps) at the WBs geocaching blog. Use the "Related Web Page" link above.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Abj guvf bar'f n fubr-glre.