Museum Tribute is Personal for South Omaha Native

Jan. 17, 2018, 6:45 a.m. ·

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Gary Kastrick inside South Omaha Museum. (Photo by Jack Williams, NET News)

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In an old building just off 24th street in historic South Omaha, there’s a good chance you’ll find a self-described “fast-talking Polish guy” doing his best to save the legacy of the neighborhood where he’s spent most of his life. He’s opened a museum, a modest tribute to a part of Omaha that’s faded over the years. Gary Kastrick wants people to remember the glory years of “South O.”


Kastrick stands inside the building on a quiet side street, a place he’s familiar with. This is personal to him.

“I used to clean this when I was a kid with my dad, this place. It was the old OPPD office,” Kastrick said. “And I used to come here, and he used to get extra jobs to make money and I used to clean 24th street with him. Well, I came back here and said wait a minute, I used to clean this place.”

It’s now a shrine to South Omaha, what he calls a “mom and pop” museum filled with artifacts from a historically blue collar area that was once home to huge stockyards, meat packing houses and giant feedlots. It was a busy place with immigrants from all over.

Inside South Omaha Museum. (Photo by Jack Williams, NET News)

“My dad was a bartender is South Omaha. That’s why I learned all about South Omaha. I learned to appreciate South Omaha with all the groups,” Kastrick said.

He opened the South Omaha Museum last year. It was the best way to get the thousands of items he’d been collecting over the years out of his basement. His collection has grown since then.

“The day we opened on March 15th, I went outside, and this Packers National Bank sign was sitting on the curb waiting for us. Somebody dropped it off and I don’t know who it was,” Kastrick said. “What’s beautiful about that is that bank was designed by Thomas Kimball, the greatest architect in Omaha, so we have a piece of Thomas Kimball sitting here.”

Original seats from Rosenblatt Stadium. (Photo by Jack Williams, NET News)

He’s set up small exhibits that highlight South Omaha’s history, things like a model of the Livestock Exchange, original stockyard pens and old pictures and documents. In the basement are more treasures, including artifacts from South Omaha’s sports history. He turns on a light in a back room.

“Here’s my crown jewel. We actually found the original seats from Rosenblatt Stadium. It was in a guy’s yard,” he said. “But they’re in bad shape but what I’m going to do is have one restored and then the other one, keep it kind of pristine.”

Admission to the museum is free. Kastrick accepts donations, but it’s mostly his hobby, a way to keep the history of South Omaha alive.

South Omaha Museum board member Marcos Mora.(Photo by Jack Williams, NET News)

“Your smaller areas like Dundee and Florence and that have their history books and everything else, but South Omaha being such a blue collar area, really, there isn’t a definitive South Omaha history book. There was no museum until this,” Kastrick said. “And yet, at one time, fifty percent of all of Omaha was working indirectly or directly for the packing houses down here and we were contributing massively to the growth of that city.”

Marcos Mora, who owns the building where the museum is located and is on its board, knows a little bit about South Omaha’s history too. His family arrived in 1926 and he’s been here all his life. When he met Kastrick and heard his story, he knew they had to do something with the historic pieces Kastrick had collected.

“You’ve got all this stuff in your basement, we need to get it out. This is just South Omaha. We need to share this history. A lot of the young kids, they don’t know that the stockyards were there,” Mora said. “They didn’t know all those pens were there. So, I just felt that he had a tremendous amount of knowledge that should be shared with everyone.”

Cattle pens from old South Omaha stockyards.(Photo by Jack Williams, NET News)

He still has a lot of work to do with hundreds of old pieces of history he hasn’t found a place for yet. But Kastrick says he’s happy to keep South Omaha’s legacy alive, a place he says is making a comeback, with new faces.

“It’s still mom and pop, small stores, grocery stores, clothing stores. But they’re not the big chain ones. And the restaurants and everything else. It’s the exact same thing it was before, only just a different nationality,” he said. “But people have to realize that we’re all immigrants that came down here, and so if we can look to our immigrant pasts, we’ll see that it’s no different.”

There’s a good chance you’ll see Gary Kastrick most days at the museum, a place where he’s surrounded by the past, with dreams that South Omaha’s rich history won’t be forgotten.