Every June, when ESPN's cameras pan across North Downtown Omaha during the College World Series, there's a good chance they catch it: a wall-sized burst of red, white, and blue at 17th and Cuming, a baseball player mid-swing, and "OMAHA" spelled out in bold letters you can't miss from a block away. For a week each summer, this corner becomes one of the most photographed backdrops in the city. What most people don't know is that the mural is sitting on top of more than a century of Omaha history.
c. 1935: 17th and Cuming Street facing west, J.F. Bloom historic building
A Building With History
The structure at 1702 Cuming was completed in 1910 as the showroom and office of J.F. Bloom & Company, founded by Swedish immigrant John Frederick Bloom, who arrived in Omaha as a stonecutter in 1879. By the time this building went up J.F. Bloom had grown into the largest monument and memorial manufacturer in the region, producing markers, mausoleums, and memorials that still stand in cemeteries across the metro today. The building was designed by architect John Latenser in a commercial vernacular style, with the clean lines and red brick you'd expect from an Omaha original. The company later shifted its main operations elsewhere, but this Cuming Street building stayed put as a piece of North Downtown's industrial backbone for decades.
By 2014, only one of the three structures on the site was still worth saving.
Rebuilding Around What Mattered
White Lotus Group acquired the property at public auction in 2015. The third and only remaining original building (the J.F. Bloom showroom) was preserved and carefully stripped to a shell and rebuilt: new and restored masonry, roofing, storefronts, mechanical and electrical systems, a rebuilt parking lot, and a full renovation that ran north of $1 million between ownership and tenant build-out costs. What came out the other side was a 7,156-square-foot renewed building that kept its century-old bones while becoming home to two very different, very Omaha tenants: China Taste and Prairie in Bloom, a home décor shop with a story of its own.
That east suite is now available for lease and serves as a great opportunity to add to it's history and join a developing neighborhood. This stretch of Cuming Street sits at the heart of what's now North Downtown's Builders District, alongside Millwork Commons and Creighton University's expanding campus, one more piece of a neighborhood that's been rebuilding itself block by block.
The Mural That Became a Landmark
In 2015, while the building's future was still taking shape, Omaha artist Justin Queal spent roughly three weeks painting a mural on its Cuming Street face, live, during that year's College World Series. The piece pairs two scenes: a baseball player swinging beneath blue mandala-like bursts, a tribute to the tournament that fills this city with fans every June, and a second scene honoring the blue-collar workers and labor unions that built Omaha's industrial neighborhoods, this one included. The result is loud, proud, and impossible to miss, exactly the point.
A decade later, that mural has become something closer to a landmark than a piece of building signage. Every CWS week, it's a backdrop for photos, a waypoint for fans walking to the ballpark, and a familiar face in national broadcast coverage of the tournament.
Now leasing: East suite in Downtown Omaha
Preserving History, Not Erasing It
It would have been easy to tear this corner down entirely, build something new, and let 1910 disappear along with it. Instead, 1702 Cuming holds three stories at once: a monument company that helped build this city one memorial at a time, a mural that turns into a citywide stage every summer, and a modern retail building that businesses can and now call home.
That's the thread we come back to on project after project; a building is never just square footage. It's a place that already means something to the people around it, and the job isn't to erase that, it's to build on it.
Now Leasing
The east suite, once home to Prairie in Bloom, is available for lease. It's built for downtown Omaha: exposed brick, big storefront glass, and modern industrial charm, right inside the mural that put this corner on the map every June.
White Lotus Group is a vertically integrated real estate development firm based in Omaha, Nebraska, founded in 2003 by Arun Agarwal. The firm has led a diverse range of projects across multifamily, mixed-use, governmental, hospitality, and commercial real estate throughout the region.
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