Between the 1870s and 1880s, real estate booms in North Omaha maybe the community grow fast. Focused on the outer edges of the city, the areas north of Cuming and east of North 24th Street grew full, fast! One of these neighborhoods was a suburb between urban splendor and country opulence sitting in the rolling hills above the rest of Omaha. This is a history of the Montclair Neighborhood.

Locating Montclair

Montclair is a deeply historic neighborhood that was originally a bridge between the city and the country, the working class and the upper class. Situated in the rolling hills west of the original Omaha settlement in the Missouri River Valley, Montclair was destined for growth.

Located on the northwest corner of North 30th and Cuming Streets, the Montclair neighborhood spreads from Hamilton Street on the north to Cuming Street on the south, and from North 30th Street on the east to North 33rd Street. Other streets in the neighborhood include…

• Lafayette Avenue
• Myrtle Avenue
• Nicholas Street
• Lincoln Boulevard
• Oregon Trail
• North 31st
• North 32nd

The neighborhood originally ran east to North 28th Avenue, but eventually ceded the area west of 30th to the Kellom Heights neighborhood. Today they are rejoined.

Laid out right on the edge of Omaha’s early streetcar network, this compact neighborhood connected the working-class families of North Omaha directly into the original Near North Side, the Capitol neighborhood, and downtown Omaha. Interesting note: When it was originally laid out in 1885, the future Montclair Neighborhood was not bordered North 30th Street, because there wasn’t one! Instead, there was a property line in its place where the future street was eventually laid. For more than 50 years, North 29th Street was the main north-south road from Cuming Street north to Ames Avenue.

The Montclair Neighborhood borders several neighborhoods including…

• Long School
• Orchard Hill
• Kellom Heights
• Bemis Park
• Highland

The original plans for the neighborhood owed their existence to a streetcar installed by Dr. Sam Mercer in 1885. Desperate to justify his investment and eager to sell real estate, almost immediately housing developers came in and started building up the first major intersection west of 24th Street, the new intersection of 30th and Cuming. For more than 25 years, this neighborhood was the hallmark of middle-class aspiration in Omaha. For the next century afterwards, it was a sign of the City’s benign neglect and systemic redlining.

Platted on the Prairie

When Omaha was founded in 1854, the initial city was clustered along the Missouri River. Before the city grew westward toward 24th Street, the US Army built a bridge over North Omaha Creek at 24th and Cuming to allow traffic to move along the old California Trail towards 33rd and Parker, where it then veered to eventually become the Military Avenue in North Omaha today. Through the 1870s, wagons would stroll west through the future intersection of 30th and Cuming, plodding alongside the North Omaha Creek, which was formed from a spring in the present-day Gifford Park near North 33rd and Cass Streets.

After Dr. Mercer’s streetcar was installed on Cuming Street in 1885, real estate speculators and housing developers scrambled to convert old farms and orchards into residential subdivisions, and the Montclair Neighborhood was one of them.

The neighborhood was not an overnight smashing success though, and took a while to get off the ground.

A Suburb By The City

The real transformation of Montclair came with urban infrastructure. The arrival of streetcar lines along major arteries like North 24th and North 30th Streets made commuting into the commercial center fast and affordable.

Between 1885 and 1900, the neighborhood filled in slowly:

1. Street Grading & Utilities: Unpaved dirt roads gave way to graded avenues and wood-plank sidewalks. Surrounding neighborhoods had improvement clubs that installed gas lamps.
2. Community Anchor Institutions: Nearby public schools including Webster School, Franklin School, and eventually, Tech High, along with faith communities within the neighborhood, served as social hubs for the early European immigrant families who settled in the houses.
3. Local Business Corridors: Corner stores, bakeries, and pharmacies popped up along streetcar stops by 1920 and gave Montclair the feel of a self-contained, walkable urban village.

The neighborhood transitioned from being a suburb-by-the-city towards becoming a suburb-in-the-city towards being a middle class oasis from the 1920s into the 1930s.

Suburban Houses

By the mid-1880s, the area near North 30th Street—roughly bounded by Lake Street to the south, Sprague Street to the north, and extending west toward the Belt Line Railway—began to take shape. It was originally laid out as two divisions called Armstrong’s and Nelson’s in 1885.

By 1910, growth in the neighborhood had stalled. In 1913, the Montclair Addition was platted. Suddenly, it was era of speculative building when houses were put up, put for sale, and working- and middle-class families seeking air and light away from the smoke and noise of downtown factories and rail yards came here to escape. Montclair was located far from any public transportation options aside from the streetcar, and early commuters relied almost solely on the streetcar instead of taking their own car downtown. When it opened to sales, lots ran between $750 and $1,500 with all improvements included.

The Omaha real estate firm of Benson and Carmichael were the developers of the Montclair Addition. Excited to carve up the remaining land of the Count John A. Creighton estate, they bought up every preceeding claim and went to it. An article from that year said, “This tract lies just east of Bemis Park, with the [Lincoln] boulevard running through a part of it.”

Continuing, the article said, “Most of the tract is high, overlooking a large part of the city of Omaha. The grading is almost completed. The platting will probably begin within the week. Then the company hopes to get the ground seeded to grass before offering it for sale. Cement sidewalks and gutters (curbs) have been laid, and tilling for sewers and water mains is in the ground. Building restrictions will be strict enough to keep out unsightly houses, and yet not so high as to bar those of moderate price. It is planned now to make those restrictions something like $2,500.”

Early residents lived in a blend of classic architectural forms popular in late Victorian Omaha:

• Gothic Revival cottages with steep gables and decorative wooden trim.
• Queen Anne residences, complete with asymmetric facades, wrap-around porches, and ornate spindlework.
• Modest shotgun and story-and-a-half homes, serving tradespeople, streetcar conductors, and retail workers employed in downtown commerce.

Within a month of opening for development in November 1913, the newspaper ran an article saying that half of the 253 lots of the addition had been sold. One developer, W.J. Peterson, built eight houses right away in the range between $3,000 and $4,600.

After their initial rush died down, Benson and Carmichael didn’t promote the neighborhood much more. More than 30 lots remained empty until four years later, when in 1919 a new speculator called the Skogman Company bought them and started building. Beginning construction almost immediately, each lot had construction on it within three months. That left “very few vacant lots” still in the neighborhood by 1920.

In 1912, the neighborhood became home to one of the major “oopsies” in Omaha’s historic preservation movement. That year, after advocacy from residents, the small short street named Oregon Trail that runs diagonally from North 30th and Nicholas Streets to North 31st Street and Lafayette Avenue got its name the wrong way. Around 1910, local historical enthusiasts and civic boosters—especially early local historians trying to mark pioneer heritage—really wanted to have monuments for what they believed were original pioneer trails through Omaha. They identified this diagonal ridge path through Montclair as part of the “Oregon Trail” and erected commemorative markers. When the surrounding grid was formalized and platted in Montclair, developers preserved this shortcut instead of getting rid of it and officially named the block-long street Oregon Trail to preserve that local story. It was wrong, of course, but the name has never been changed and likely never will be.

Redlining and Racial Transformation

By the 1930s, the white supremacist forces that were reshaping much of North Omaha began taking hold in Montclair. As post-WWI economic shifts and white flight began driving established white families further west and north toward new suburbs like Benson, Dundee, and Minne Lusa, Montclair became one of the first historically segregated neighborhoods to allow African American homeowners and renters.

In the 1930s, the City of Omaha strategically severed Montclair from the Gifford Park neighborhood, ensuring any future developments in that neighborhood felt geographically distinct from their wealthy neighbors to the south. When the Northwest Radical was finished being built, it fundamentally changed the traffic patterns and residential flow along Montclair’s southern border.

However, structural barriers soon intervened:

• Federal Redlining: In the late 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) mapped Omaha’s residential zones. Because African Americans lived in and were moving into the neighborhood, financial institutions designated Montclair as “hazardous” for mortgage lending.
• Disinvestment: Denied conventional bank loans and insurance, residents faced steep hurdles maintaining aging housing stock.
• Resilience: Despite systemic exclusion, Black families turned Montclair into a vibrant, tight-knit community, fostering pride in homeownership and supporting independent Black-owned businesses across North Omaha.

The neighborhood’s racial makeup changed dramatically over the next 10 years, and by the 1960s it was a predominantly mixed neighborhood. Located across the street from Technical High School, Black students in the neighborhood attended Franklin School and then Tech.

In the 1950s, a neighborhood in west Omaha stole the Montclair name from this historic neighborhood. Today, they continue to appropriate the name for the neighborhood, a school, and a drive among other things.

Following decades of disinvestment by the City of Omaha and redlining that suppressed values, property values in the neighborhood reached the bottom around 2000, often under $50,000 for an average house.

Montclair Neighborhood Association

In the late 1970s, the neighborhood was targeted by the City of Omaha for the construction of new OHA duplexes for low-income families. Neighbors protested against it, with Beatrice Jenkins (1910-2013), wife of the former minister of Hope Lutheran Church, leading the charge. She said her opposition wasn’t racism, it was about the prospective new tenants’ rights, lack of concern by OHA officials, maintenance, and lack of consideration for site convenience. “OHA is punishing people because they’re poor by putting them where they’re not wanted. I’m poor, too.” She organized her neighbors into a community group that year.

Through the 1980s the neighborhood continued struggling. White flight left the area with a lot of disengaged homeowners and absentee landlords, a lot of the larger homes were carved into apartments, and the situation seemed bleak. The City of Omaha made some efforts to assist, including facilitating brush and tree cleaning projects and more. However, complaints came often about their lack of concern and connection with the residents and the neighborhood at large. During that decade, the neighborhood was filled with mostly African American residents.

In 1993, Robin and Paul Bryant were featured in the newspaper for their efforts to revitalize a historic home in the neighborhood. Located at North 32nd and Lafayette, their home was a 1915 Greek Revival style two-story house that was rumored to be haunted. After buying it in 1990 for $7,500, the Bryants finished it with 3,300 square feet on three floors. Spending approximately $50,000 on renovations, the project was meant with skepticism by contractors and banks. However, they finished successfully.

Mrs. Jenkins went on to serve as the president of the Montclair Neighborhood Association for decades and Paul Bryant was the vice-president in the 1990s. Mrs. Jenkins was featured again in the newspaper in 1998. Then, the article focused on a citywide neighborhood-based initiative to lower crime. Mrs. Jenkins said she’d talked to absentee landlords, called police about suspected crack houses in the neighborhood, and otherwise get active. In the same article, another neighbor, Reba Cooper, talked about the good relations she had with a group of Creighton students who rented next to her. They took care of her lawn, and she brought them homemade macaroni and cheese.

Mrs. Jenkins died in 2013. As recently as 2017, the association won a grant from the City of Omaha to put up signage for a defunct neighborhood safety program. Apparently though, today there is no active Montclair Neighborhood Association.

Preserving Montclair’s Legacy

In the mid-to-late 20th century, the combination of municipal neglect, urban renewal schemes by the City of Omaha, and highway construction altered almost everything around Montclair. Yet many of the neighborhood’s original homes survived. Today, these late 19th-century structures represent a significant historical collection of working-class architectural heritage in Omaha. Coupled with the vital neighboring Bemis Park Landmark Historical District to the west, Montclair represents the unrealized potential of historic preservation in North Omaha.

Over the last two decades—and especially since 2015—the Montclair Neighborhood has experienced significant value appreciation along with broader revitalization throughout North Omaha. Local historical interest and Omaha’s overall housing market growth are actually making housing prices jump, for better or worse. In 2026, housing info shows in the Montclair Neighborhood houses typically list and sell between $145,000 and $280,000 depending on home size, structural condition, and degree of renovation. Dozens of homes in the neighborhood have been surveyed by the City of Omaha for their historical value, but none have been designated for preservation or listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Some of Montclair’s historic homes identified by the City include…

Today, the neighborhood is home to Omaha’s only year-around neighborhood farmer’s market, located today at St. Matthew’s Baptist Church, 1001 North 30th Street.

Understanding the history of the Montclair subdivision isn’t just nostalgia—it is important for understanding how the City of Omaha’s policies, redlining, and neighborhood resilience shaped the map of North Omaha historically, and still do today!

Historic Places in Montclair

While some historic places in the Montclair Neighborhood have been lost, today there are several historic places within the boundaries.

• Montclair Shopping Strip at N. 30th and Cuming: On the southeast corner of the neighborhood stood the Montclair Market, a neighborhood grocery staple owned by Italian immigrant brothers Anthony and Dominic Battiato from the 1930s into the 1960s. Along with a gas station and several other small businesses, the northwest corner of 30th and Cuming was a shopping anchor along the Cuming Street streetcar line and was a prime example of the small business clusters that once filled North Omaha’s streetcar intersections.
• Lincoln Boulevard: Passing through the inside of the neighborhood, Lincoln Boulevard was developed as part of North Omaha’s historic boulevard system from 1892. This stretch is noted for its concentration of 1880s and 1890s late-Victorian and American Foursquare homes that housed early middle-class tradespeople, streetcar operators, and business owners.
• 30th & Cuming / The Radial Highway Gateway: The intersection at 30th and Cuming Streets served as the historic southern gateway into Montclair. It is historically noted as the beginning of the Northwest Radial Highway—Omaha’s first major urban highway infrastructure project built in the late 1930s.
• Oregon Trail Rock: Reading, “This boulder erected 1912 by Omaha chapter Daughters of the American Revolution to mark place of the Oregon Trails 1846 the California Trail 1849 later called the Military Road,” this monument is located along in the Montclair Neighborhood at 3026 Lincoln Boulevard in North Omaha. It is the only monument specifically marking this important roadway in the community.
• St. Matthew’s Baptist Church: Originally built as the Our Savior Lutheran Church, the present-day St. Matthew Missionary Baptist Church at 1001 North 30th Street (30th and Izard) was home to the Afro Academy for Dramatic Arts for more than a decade. Today the church hosts the Montclair Farmer’s Market and youth programs.
• Starlight Chateau: Located on the northeastern corner of Montclair, the former St. Clare’s Franciscan Monastery served as a Catholic landmark for 80 years. Started as the first house of the Poor Clares order in the Western Hemisphere, a permanent brick complex was built at North 29th and Hamilton Streets with financial support from Count John A. Creighton in 1888. A new monastery building was completed at 1310 North 29th Street in 1904, expanding over the years to include an additional wing, chapel, and subterranean crypts. The monastery remained until the order relocated in 1971. Today its home to a rental facility and more.
• Oldest of Its Kind? Located within Montclair, the rowhouse at 1001 North 29th Street stands as what might be the oldest of its kind in North Omaha, an essential surviving example of late 19th-century multi-family urban architecture. Its my favorite at least. Built in 1890 during a period of rapid expansion west, this builing reflects the neighborhood’s early push toward dense, accessible housing options for working-class families near major streetcar routes. Preserved today as an active residence, its an intact testament to late Victorian rowhouse construction.

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MY ARTICLES ABOUT HISTORIC NEIGHBORHOODS IN NORTH OMAHA
National Register of Historic Places Historic Districts in North Omaha: 24th and Lake Historic District | Benson Downtown Historic District | Country Club Historic District | Dundee/Happy Hollow Historic District | Fairacres Historic District | Fort Omaha Historic District | Minne Lusa Historic District | Nicholas Street Historic District
Historic Neighborhoods in North Omaha: Bedford Place | Belvedere Point | Bemis Park | Benson | Briggs | Bungalow City | Carter Lake, Iowa | Central Park | Clifton Hill | Collier Place | Creighton University | Crown Point | DeBolt | Druid Hill | East Omaha | Fairfax | Florence | Florence Field | Fort Omaha | Fontenelle View | Gifford Park | Gold Coast (Cathedral) | High Point | Jefferson Square | Kellom Heights | Kountze Place | Lakewood Gardens | Little Russia | Long School | Malcolm X Memorial | Miller Park | Miller Park Duplex Historic District | Monmouth Park | Montclair | Near North Side | North Downtown Omaha | Omaha View | Orchard Hill | Plum Nelly | Prairie Park | Prettiest Mile in Omaha | Prospect Place | Raven Oaks | Redman | Saratoga | Sherman | Squatter’s Row | Sulphur Springs | Ponca Hills | Wakonda | Walnut Hill | Winspear Triangle | Wyman Heights
Lost Towns in North Omaha: Benson | Briggs | Cutler’s Park | DeBolt | East Omaha | Florence | Saratoga | Sulphur Springs | Winter Quarters

BONUS!