Conor Slept Here

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In a smoke-hazed Nebraska living room, about 20 college-aged hipsters sit cross-legged on a grimy hardwood floor, watching Greg Elsasser play acoustic guitar. It’s well after midnight on a Thursday, and both Elsasser and his audience have been drawing liberally from a bottle of Kessler Whiskey. They drunkenly shout along as he sings, “When Hotel Frank died / It made me feel awful sad inside.” The sound is intense and warbling and a little surreal, since Hotel Frank is, in fact, the current local nickname for the very house where Elsasser is performing, a three-wing incubator of youth culture that sits on the corner of 38th and Farnam Streets in midtown Omaha.

For the better part of the past two decades, a rotating cast of musicians and creative minds have stumbled in and out of its unlocked doors, each generation giving the red-brick triplex a name and identity of its own. Elsasser's band, Capgun Coup—considered by many the heart of Omaha’s current indie-rock scene—lived here until last summer. Capgun was the last of the current leading bands to call Hotel Frank home, and the house’s new residents—some musicians, some not—haven’t yet established themselves. So when Elsasser sings about Hotel Frank dying, he’s only half joking: For all its history, the house now seems like a shell of its former self.

“I still think of the east wing as the last part of Hotel Frank,” says Aaron Haug, the rare veteran who has lived in the house for three years. With all these new people moving into the middle and west wings, he says it feels like “they just cut off our head and our left arm or something.”

The history of 3821 Farnam Street is a blur of beer-soaked memories affectionately retold by the people who’ve lived there for flashes of time. Specifics of the house’s early punk days have faded, leaving behind mostly shabby recollections of late-’80s parties and living-room and basement concerts. A decade later, as the ’90s drew to a close, a group of young musicians moved in and, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, became witnesses to the humble beginnings of Omaha’s rise to music-scene celebrity.

Conor Oberst lived up the creaky stairs in the bedroom on the right, now home to a perky blonde student whose Polaroid photos fill the sky-blue walls. Todd Fink of The Faint remembers writing songs for the band’s second album, Blank-wave Arcade, in the third-floor bedroom that overlooks the old car-repair shop on Farnam. Members of Son Ambulance, The Good Life and Cursive—all bands now signed to local indie powerhouse Saddle Creek Records—lived and collaborated in the house during that period, and Oberst’s bands Desaparecidos and Bright Eyes held some of their first concerts in the graffiti-covered basement.

“The ceilings were low and people were packed in,” says Saddle Creek licensing manager Jeff Tafolla, sitting in his office at the label’s shiny new digs just north of downtown Omaha. “Maybe you could fit 50 people in there really packed. There were lots of shows there that were 10 to 15 people. But then again, there were others where it was completely packed upstairs and downstairs.”

Shortly after the Saddle Creek crew moved out of 3821 Farnam in 1999, Oberst and Fink rose to notoriety, and the label found its place among the indie-rock elite. The house has since been handed down to younger generations of Omaha musicians and artists, bestowing upon its residents a creative tradition and artistic responsibility—even if the newcomers haven’t yet lived up to the tradition, they’re aware of the expectations from local-music fans and Hotel Frank alumni. “I’m happy to see that people are keeping it going,” Fink says from his new home in Los Angeles. “It’s inspirational to be reminded of the feeling you have when something feels like it’s very special and only the people in the room know how good it is. There’s a kind of magic in the air with a situation like that.”

Hotel Frank’s 7,070 square feet are split into three separate wings: The middle section sits between the east and west wing’s pointed roofs and bay windows. Anywhere from six to eight people fill the upstairs bedrooms in each unit, which can drive the rent under $150 per person. At certain points in the house’s recent history, all three wings have been occupied by a common group of friends, giving the building the communal feel it has today. Still, it looks like a flophouse and smells like an ashtray.

The place was built in 1908 and was once considered a stately home in an elegant area of Omaha. Today, its east-wing stoop, often littered with cigarette butts and empty PBR cans, is situated next door to a brown-and-yellow halfway house in a disintegrated neighborhood of small businesses and apartment buildings.

The east wing is home to six guys. A heaping pile of trash—half-heartedly disguised by a navy-blue blanket and a slab of wood from a broken door—greets guests upon entering. Hotel Frank has been unofficially blacklisted by the city sanitation, so late-night trash runs happen approximately every two months.

It’s late winter and the air is chilled. Last month’s heating bill was only $40, and the tenants are shooting for even cheaper this month. The living room is bare save for the leftover beer cans that line the wall, plus a record player and whatever art installation the housemates have been working on over the past few days (currently, a fort made of fabric tied to a ceiling fan and attached to the wall).

Change is constant in this complex—people rarely stay more than a year, most around six months. Bills pile up, as do the trash heaps and the tension of living with a large group of people. It was like this when the place was known as the Farnam House in the ’80s, the Jerkstore in the ’90s and the Gun Boat and Power Pad in the early 2000s. The most recent moniker honors doe-eyed Frank Troia, a 25-year-old DJ and the first person to sign the lease upon moving in, back in 2005. (He’s since moved out, and says the name wasn’t his choice. “I got outvoted,” he says. “It was them against me.”) Maybe the new crew will rename the place, too, once the last Hotel Frank holdovers still residing in the east wing finally move on.

When some past residents talk about Hotel Frank, they speak in an uncertain past tense that suggests an era has come and gone. “It was fucking carpe diem,” says Alice Gribbin, an aspiring poet from London who lived in the house for a year before moving back to England in 2007. “No one thought about the consequences back then.” But they forget that this is the way things have always been—that the transient nature of the house’s occupants is really the only stable thing about it, and possibly what’s made it such a special place to begin with.

“You can’t have something so exciting forever,” says local- music fixture Derek Pressnall, frontman of Omaha bands Tilly and the Wall and Flowers Forever, milling about his kitchen in midtown, not far from Hotel Frank. “You have to let it die and let something else be born. I guess you can’t really figure that out while you’re in it.”

Still, intimate concerts continue regularly in the east wing’s living room—a big show featuring Capgun and current east-wing dwellers Conchance and Adam Robert Haug is planned for two days after Elsasser's acoustic living-room show. The housemates are banking on a crowd rivaling the 200 or so people who showed up to parties during the summers when the Capgun crew still lived there.

Even with the exodus of Hotel Frank’s original residents, Haug and friends aren’t worried about the future of the house. Someday they’d like to buy it if they ever get around to saving enough money (its 2008 tax-assessed value is about $74,000). They’ve even discussed creating a network of similar houses across the country. They look back on their time at Hotel Frank with beery nostalgia—it’s easy to romanticize Omaha’s recent past as an indie golden age, but they know this isn’t the end. It’s simply a quiet moment in a noisy history.