Omaha Exploration

When Steve Hammerstrom opened his gourmet coffee shop in 1991, Omaha didn’t have a Starbucks or even its first Scooters for another seven years.

That marks the year that the Seattle native arrived and opened Espresso Express in the mall of the Brandeis Building on 16th and Douglas Streets. From that location he sold coffee in the paper cups and plastic lids that have become so familiar in the cultural landscape. 

Steve said at the time it was much more difficult to open a coffee shop here than back home. In Seattle, every restaurant supply company had the equipment necessary to start a stand. In Omaha he had to become his own supplier. In the process he became the distributor for espresso machines and flavored syrups. This would mark the beginning of a coffee empire. 

While his original coffee stand failed to turn a profit, he relocated to Dundee at 109 N 50th Street and St. Joseph’s Hospital. It wasn’t until he opened his Seattle-style coffee shop in 1993 that his vision really started to take hold. At that point he abandoned the Espresso Express name and instead named the shop 13th Street Coffee. The new shop opened in a former warehouse on the edge of the Old Market at 13th and Jackson. It proved to be the perfect location with its eclectic customer base that ranged from artists to professionals and students. 

By this time Steve had married his one-time long distance girlfriend, Paulette Mask, which is what brought him to Omaha in the first place. It was during her visits to Seattle where they first conceived of opening Omaha’s first gourmet coffee shop. 

The couple went to work converting the space at 519 S 13th Street into a coffee shop by building a loft and covering the high ceilings with corrugated steel and added hanging lights. They decorated the space themselves with an oversized coffee cup, posters, T-shirts, a large swatch watch on the wall along with a large Japanese scroll with the coffee shop’s name. Make no mistake though, like any Seattle coffee worth its beans, the focus was on the coffee not the interior or even its other offerings which included desserts, sandwiches, soups,  bagels, muffins, cheesecake and cookies. 

To help pass the time, the coffee shop had chess boards and magazines to peruse. It even offered live music on some evenings. Two years after it opened, they opened Omaha’s first cybercafe in 1995 which offered customers the ability to surf the web for $2.25 per hour. This was at a time that cybercafes were popular on the coasts as most homes didn’t yet have personal computers of their own. 

Its founders opted to sell the downtown coffee shop which had developed into a popular meeting spot among both high school and college students. In 1996 they focused their attention on a new venture: Omaha’s first drive thru coffee shop at 7772 Cass Street in a former Goodrich Dairy. They called it Crane Coffee and it became the biggest local chain at the time with seven locations. The name was inspired by the Sandhill Cranes that migrate through Nebraska. The new owner of 13th Street Coffee meanwhile would go on to open new locations near Bellevue University and in Dundee at 50th and Capitol in the current day location of Dundee Double Shot.

After Steve passed away in 2006 at the age of 63, Paulettte continued to operate Crane which grew to nine locations by the time she sold the business in 2008. Crane was acquired by Scooter’s in 2019. Scooter’s got its start in Bellevue in 1998 and has grown to over 230 locations in 15 states since then. 

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