Published January 8, 2026 | Updated June 8, 2026

Fritz Muller was best known for being the proprietor of the Schlitz Pavilion at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in 1898. Following its massive success, he went on to build an Italianate commercial structure in the heart of the Spring Lake neighborhood that stands out from the houses that surround it.

Born in Germany in 1855, Fritz Muller (sometimes spelled Mueller) married Wilhelmina in 1877 and settled in Omaha around 1880. As they started a family, including sons Otto, Charles, and Fritz Jr., as well as daughter Bertha Muller Kramer, he spent his first few years in South Omaha working in a brick and lumber yard while learning English. Beginning around 1890, he constructed multiple buildings along what is now the Vinton Street Historic District, from 16th to 19th Streets. Among these were a small hotel at 18th and Vinton Streets and two movie theaters: the Favorite at 1718 Vinton Street (present-day Louie M’s Burger Lust) and the Mueller at 1702 Vinton Street (now Restaurant Y Pupuseria).

Following the exposition in Omaha, he established Muller & Sons. The sons worked as caterers for various expositions across the country, including Buffalo, New York, and St. Louis, among others. Following the death of his wife, who went by Minna, Fritz remarried by 1915.

As his sons moved around, Fritz largely remained in Omaha and built the Spring Lake commercial building at the corner of 16th and B Streets (then referred to as Canton) in 1902. Located at 3702/3704 S. 16th Street, the two-story building was designed by architect Joseph Guth and built by Bridges & Hoye. Like Fritz, Guth was a German immigrant and became a prominent architect in Omaha who designed the Prague Hotel in Little Bohemia as well as the buildings for both the Storz and Krug breweries.

The Guth designed building featured brick with cut-stone details, including columns, a denticulated cornice, finials, a cast-iron column at the corner storefront, and multi-pane windows with a recessed entryway. As impressive as this building is, there’s an older and even more impressive two-story brick building that sits behind it and once served as a horse stable and hayloft. A review of newspaper archives suggests it may have been built in the 1890s, or maybe even earlier.

Like his Vinton Street buildings, this property served as an investment, operating as a neighborhood grocery store in its early years with second-floor apartments above. As such, Fritz leased the building to various businesses over the years, including the Welnehl and Kocourek Bakery, as well as Steil and McGuire Grocery, among others.

His second wife was Lucy Dearth Muller, who was 26 years his junior. They had two children together in Walter and Paul before Fritz passed away just eight years after their marriage. He was 68 years old. It appears that he willed the Spring Lake building and three houses to Bertha while the Vinton Street properties went to his first three sons (Otto, Charles, and Fritz Jr.). The remainder of the estate valued at $300,000 went to Walter and Paul, his two sons from his second marriage. Even so, there was some dispute over the will, as property left to his second wife had been the result of a prenuptial agreement.

Influential among his fellow countrymen, Fritz is said to have wielded considerable influence over the German vote while refusing to run for office himself. His son Otto said in an interview with the Omaha World-Herald that when his father came to Omaha, he “put his money in four different banks so if one failed, he wouldn’t lose all he had.” He also maintained a vast real estate portfolio that included his property along Vinton Street as well as 25 to 30 houses he built in the Spring Lake neighborhood, including his own at 3715 S. 16th Street.

The Spring Lake building found new life in 2005 as the home of the self-funded Las Artes Galeria, a cultural art gallery operated by Jose Garcia, a railroad crew manager, and his wife Linda, a retired librarian at the South Omaha Library who had been involved in the local arts scene as far back as the 1970s. The Garcias collected folk art, photos, and documents dating as far back as the 1920s that traced the stories of Latinos in Omaha. They used this building to display their collection, which included more than 1,000 photographs in addition to art from Latino artists. Jose told the Omaha World-Herald that his goal was to “maintain a record of the Latino community’s evolution as an ‘American cultural phenomenon.’” It seems that its life as a gallery came to an end around 2011.

A permit was filed by its current owner for a renovation in 2018, which included combining the two second-floor apartments into a single living space. In addition, the hayloft that sits above the old horse stable is being turned into a photography studio.

More than 100 years after he passed away, Fritz Muller’s impact on the city is still visible, from the Vinton Street Historic District to the houses and commercial buildings he built in Spring Lake. They continue to serve as a reminder of the influence and contributions that generations of immigrants have had on South Omaha, whether it be Fritz Muller from Germany or the Garcias’ grandparents from Mexico.

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More pictures

• Omaha World-Herald archives
• Frederick John “Fritz” Muller (1855-1923) – Find a Grave Memorial
• Joseph P. Guth – Wikipedia