The best place to have a Husker tailgate might be 16 stories high

The bleachers at Memorial Stadium are empty, the video board a small, black rectangle. The pale blue sky is empty, too, and the horizon seems to go on forever.

It’s no wonder that when people first walk into Paula Harre and Dan Duncan’s condo on the west side of Lied Place, they look north.

“They walk over to the windows,” Harre said. “Everybody does.”

Harre and Duncan are among the few people in Lincoln to have such a commanding living-room view of the stadium, which on Saturday will look drastically different.

It makes quite the backdrop when the retired couple — Harre is an orthodontist and taught at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Dentistry and Duncan is the former executive director of Nebraska Innovation Campus — host guests for a high-rise tailgate before going to the game.

“Oh, it’s crazy,” Harre said. “We can hear the tailgate at the Embassy (Suites), we can hear the band. Even though we don’t hear much up here most of the time, on gamedays we do.”

Typically, on fall Saturdays, the couple will have a few friends up before walking over to tailgates on the ground. A couple of years ago, Harre and Duncan hosted a party for Harre’s dental school class reunion on a gameday, with tables of food and a bar, coolers in the hallway and even a check-in table in the lobby. They’ll host another tailgate before the Rutgers game on Oct. 5 as part of a weekend celebration of the dental school’s 125th anniversary.

The two were among the first tenants to move into Lied Place in March 2022, snagging a 2,300-square-foot, two-story unit on the west side of the 22-story Q Street high rise. The first floor is the living space and kitchen with stairs leading up to a two-bedroom space on the 17th floor.

They had been looking to move downtown from south Lincoln, near where Harre ran her practice before she sold it in 2017. Duncan, who retired in April 2023, was still working for the university and commuting each day from their Wilderness Ridge home, and the couple are also season-ticket holders for football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and volleyball and enjoy going to concerts.

Lied Place — with 37 residential units and four floors of commercial space, home to a restaurant, law firm and the university’s official NIL partner 1890 Nebraska — was the perfect place to make their home.

“It’s plenty for the two of us,” Duncan said. 

During the games, you’re more likely to find Duncan and Harre, who have been married for 23 years, at the stadium than at home. Two years ago, they did take in a game from Lied Place because they had to quarantine due to COVID. They watched on TV — the field is obscured and too far way anyway to discern any of the action — although Duncan got his binoculars out.

“Between the TV and the stadium, there’s a 30- to 45-second delay,” he said. “So they’ll be sometimes two plays away and the fireworks are going off.” 

The unique perspective also gives Duncan, who says he’s been to most of home football games since 1977, a unexpected insight into the future of the team.

“What’s interesting about living here is we lived here when the previous coach was here and then with Matt Rhule,” he said. “The activity in the stadium is greatly increased with Matt Rhule. You can tell when recruits are in town because the scoreboards on.”

“Sometimes, at 5:30 in the morning,” Harre added with a laugh.

They also can see the state Capitol through south-facing windows and can take in a wide sweep of the Haymarket from the west. Weather is another sight to behold, especially during blizzards and thunderstorms.

“People will say, ‘Wow, how was it. Were you just swaying up there?’ And we don’t even feel it,” Duncan said.

Duncan, who is originally from the Panhandle, and Harre, who is from Lincoln, are often not alone in their Lied Place condo.

For years, the couple has been involved with Domesti-Pups, a local organization that raises and trains service dogs for people with disabilities, mainly young adults with seizure disorders, and have taken in about 40 dogs that stay for a weekend, a week or even longer.

When I showed up Monday, Lenny, a black Labrador recovering from a recent surgery, was their latest guest, lounging next to the big north-facing windows. Unable to walk for now, Harre likes to take him on a walks on campus using a dog stroller.

He’ll be with staying with them until October, deep into the Husker season, when, on Saturdays in the fall, that sleeping giant to the north awakes.