Photo by Clifford Atiyeh

We’ve heard of Carson City, Michigan, and even Carson City, New York. But how about Carson City, Sweden?

Carson City—located in the real town of Vårgårda, an hour from Volvo headquarters in Gothenburg—is the world’s only purpose-built simulated city for testing active safety systems. It’s run by Autoliv, a Swedish supplier that researches and manufactures safety components for nearly every car brand in the world. (Autoliv’s major clients are BMW, Mercedes, and Audi; Volvo develops most of its own systems.) Instead of choosing a Swedish name for the “town,” the company was inspired by Nevada’s state capital, particularly that city’s near-abandonment after the gold rush. (Plus, Carson City sounds a bit like the name of Autoliv’s CEO, Jan Carlson.) Indeed, entering the 0.7-mile-long strip is like stepping onto the set of an old Western film; it’s a one-block ghost town.

Some new construction has just started at the south end of town. Crews moved in this week and tore up one of the old car lots. The signs went up a couple of days ago saying that it will soon be the home of a new Auto Zone auto parts store. This is right across the street from O’Reilly Auto Parts, and I’m not so sure that there’s enough demand for two competing auto parts stores in this part of town. It’s hard to make a left turn across the street here, so maybe there will be one store for folks heading north and one for folks heading south.

Good to see that a company has enough confidence in Carson City to give it a go, though. There’s one Auto Zone in town already out Hwy 50 East.

Carson Cove at the back of the Carson Mall has seen a few restaurants come and go. L&L Barbecue is long gone, but last year a replacement opened in its place: Thai Thai.

Right next door, the Paradise Cove Cafe closed some time ago. The space was empty for a bit, but now there is something new moving in. The signs are up for Zen’s Cafe, a local chain from Arizona that is taking a shot on Carson City.

These will definitely be a couple of places to check out!

The great teardown has begun. The Gilbert, Ross and Waters Buildings are coming down. Gilbert is first.

Back when the Carson Tahoe Hospital was on the west side of town, near the Governor’s Mansion, the area around there was the heart of Carson City’s medical community. Most doctors wanted to have offices nearby the hospital, so quite a few buildings sprung up next to the hospital that housed private practices. The largest of these was built right next door, and it was actually a huge complex made up of three buildings. Lots of doctors kept their offices in this complex, conveniently close to the hospital. The Ross, Gilbert and Waters buildings were built in 1976, and served the medical community well for three decades.

Eventually the hospital outgrew its space and had to look for somewhere new. It ended up moving to the north end of town, and the old hospital building was left holding just a few specialty clinics. With the hospital all the way across town, many of the doctors were feeling left behind in their old offices. As a collection of brand new shiny medical office buildings sprung up around the new hospital, the doctors one by one abandoned the heart of town and moved to the suburbs. After a few years, the neighborhood around the old hospital was starting to look a bit like a ghost town. Only Carson Medical Group hung onto their campus on Mountain Street. Ross, Gilbert and Waters were no longer needed.

So now I guess the natural conclusion is for them to be torn down. And that’s exactly what is happening. Fire crews have been using the buildings for training the last couple of months, which we all know is the death knell. Now the bulldozers are on site, and this week they started knocking them down.

I’ll be running around the site and getting some pictures of the demolition in progress, but first we have some of the last pictures of the buildings while they were still standing. According to a source that will not be named, the plan now is just to let the site sit empty. I guess the future of the land will be tied to how much life there is in the old hospital and its surroundings over the next few years.

Everything I know about the Golden Dragon is in my memory, and it’s not much. Nobody has written an extensive history of the building, like they have for Jack’s Bar. It’s a bit out of town, it’s set back from the street, and most people probably drive by it without even knowing it’s there. But it’s one of Carson City’s most persistent ghosts.

The Golden Dragon, at 2600 N. Carson Street, was a Chinese restaurant once upon a time. It closed long ago, probably in the late 80s although you could convince me that it was open into the early 90s. Ever since then it’s just sat there, ignored. Dennis Hof, of Bunny Ranch fame, bought it several years agoand kicked around the idea of reopening it. He even had the sign replaced with an electronic reader board. The project didn’t get much further than that, though he still owns the apartment building behind the restaurant, which apparently is used as employee housing for the Bunny Ranch.

I think the Golden Dragon is destined to sit for eternity, forgotten. Another restaurant with the same name opened off College Parkway a few years ago, so it can’t reopen under that name. Hof in 2001 was talking about turning it into a tequila bar, but 10 years later who knows how his tastes may have changed. I’ve found the name “Moonlite Road House” attached to the property, but who knows how many years ago that was from. This is one of those ghosts that we just accept nothing is ever going to happen with, and we keep driving by it. Maybe one day we’ll be surprised.

2003 Pictures

I surveyed this building for the original Ghosts of Carson page. Not much has changed since then. They boarded up most of the windows, and blacked out the ones they didn’t board up. Aside from that, it’s hardly changed at all. Here’s the pictures from back then.

I’ve been watching this development in the Carson Valley over the last couple of years. It’s been rumored that there was a casino being planned for this site for probably 20 years; it’s the empty land just north of the Silver City RV Park at the north end of the valley. Recently the rumors have been confirmed, and even a name for the casino has come forth: GoldTown Hotel and Casino. About a year and a half ago they finally broke ground on the project, bringing in tractors and clearing the land. After the land was cleared nothing else happened, and one by one the tractors slowly disappeared.

I guess last winter you could have said that the project was on hold because of the weather. But that excuse evaporated over the summer, and the long dry winter that we’ve had. It started to become kind of conspicuous that there wasn’t any more construction going on at the site, that they hadn’t started working on the casino itself. But it was still possible that they would start on it this spring.

But then came the black gravel.

A couple of weeks ago the tractors returned, but this time they had a new job. They spread a chunky black gravel over the entire construction site. This isn’t something you do before a major hotel building project. This is what you do when you have a big empty lot that you’re not going to be doing anything with and you want a permanent form of dust control. This to me is the surest sign that the GoldTown project has gone back into hibernation, that all the ground clearing that they did was for nothing. Worse than nothing, in fact, because they’ve basically poured money into an empty lot for no purpose.

So I’ll be keeping an eye on this lot, though I’m really not expecting to see anything else be done with this land for quite a long time.

View Large

They’ve been putting up a lot of art along the Carson City Freeway in the last couple of years. At Fairview and Fifth Street there are the wire sculptures of settlers and natives, they bolted silhouettes of cows onto the railings, and now they’re starting to sandblast etchings into some of the overpasses. The most elaborate etching is this one, under the Hwy 50 overpass. It represents the old V&T Roundhouse.

I’ll have to do a whole photo series on all the art being installed.

Looks like the long-abandoned Minden Gateway Center is finally getting its first tenant…a Maverik gas station? The Minden Gateway Center was supposed to be a big retail/commercial development at the corner of Hwy 395 and 88 in Minden. Everything was going along fine, they cleared all the land and poured a little bit of parking lot, they even built a hotel. But then the bottom fell out of the whole project when the real estate market tanked, and nothing ever sprouted on the site except weeds. Now Maverik Gas is ready to move into the space, looking to compete with Arco for gas sales at the north end of Minden. Nothing else has been announced yet, but maybe this is a sign that the center is not completely dead. If they can get one tenant, maybe the wheels are starting to turn and a few more will slip in.

Once upon a dream

Maybe not, though. There is only so much retail steam in Minden/Gardnerville, and the new Wal-Mart is going to suck up a lot of it when construction gets going later this year. It will be nice to see something get built on this land, at least, after all the work they did.

Jack’s Bar says it has been “A Saloon Since 1859.” That’s a lie. It’s not surprising that this building would lie to you, since on the opposite corner it says “Always Open,” and that is clearly not the case. In fact, Jack’s Bar hasn’t been open for more than 10 years. What started as a vacation for the owner has become over a decade of neglect, decay, and structural problems that cement its status as one of the most entrenched ghosts of Carson City. Yet still there is a mystique to this stone building at the corner of Fifth and Carson, something that calls to us as we drive by it.

Jack’s Bar doesn’t date all the way back to 1859, but it does go back before the memory of any living Carsonite. Guy Rocha has traced the history of the building back to 1899. It first opened on August 19, 1899, as the Bank Saloon. It was created out of sandstone from the State Prison, the same sandstone quarry that Abe Curry used to build the U.S. Mint, the State Capitol, and the V&T Roundhouse. Before the Bank Saloon this corner held a wooden frame building that did indeed date back to 1859. That structure was built as a dance hall, then was turned into the Frisbie Hotel. It lasted over 30 years, until it was demolished in 1892. The lot sat empty until 1898, when Johnny Meyer, who was running the Sacramento Saloon on the other side of Fifth Street, decided to build his own place. Then the Bank Saloon was born. Throughout the 20th century it saw a host of other names, including  the Bank Resort, Hernando’s Hideaway, the Y-NOT Bar, and Angelo’s. Finally in 1966 it was renamed Jack’s Bar, and that’s what it’s been called ever since.

1956

2000

The recent history of Jack’s Bar is a little more clear. Doug Addison bought the business in 1977, as part of his “first retirement.” He held onto it until 2002 when he finally closed it so he could go into a “second retirement” in Virginia City. He died just two years ago; you can find his obituary at Virginia City News. During the time Doug owned it it was a popular hangout in downtown Carson, with its neon lights always beckoning on a dark night. Its location across the street from the Legislature made it especially popular among legislators and lobbyists. Many a deal was presumably made in the dark corners of Jack’s Bar.

After Doug closed the bar, he sold it to Don Lehr and Al Fiegehen. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll recognize those names as the principals of Cubix Corporation, and more popularly as the folks who bought the Ormsby House in 1999. The bar had been overshadowed by the monolith across the street for 30 years, so it made a kind of poetic sense that they would fall under the same umbrella of ownership eventually. From Don and Al’s point of view, it made sense because they had already taken stewardship of one Carson City landmark, so why not take in another one too?

Early on, though, they ran into problems. As they started to poke around the structure they uncovered one problem after another. The whole building was leaning a little bit to the left. You can see it in the picture above; the south wall is tilted, and it’s pulling the east wall over with it. The north wall is separating from the building next door, and debris is falling into the cracks. Basically, it’s an old building, and like many old buildings it’s starting to fall apart. This document from 2003 reports the minutes from a meeting of the Carson City Historic Resources Commission where Don Lehr tried to argue that case that Jack’s Bar was too far gone, and might not be worth the trouble to save. It’s not noted in these minutes, but Don and Al wanted to give up on the building as a loss and wanted to have it demolished. They did take out the Capitol Motel just behind it; that was less of a landmark and more of a heath hazard, so it was easy. The commission was able to talk them out of demolishing Jack’s Bar, but they said that with the Ormsby House taking up so much of their time and attention, they wouldn’t be able to do anything with the bar until the hotel across the street was finished.

So that’s pretty much where we stand now. Several experts testified that the bar could be rehabilitated and brought back to structural soundness, and the owners have responded with a half-hearted “Okay. Someday.” They put a few measures in place, like bracing cables to reduce the likelihood that the south wall will collapse on itself, and boarded up the building. They’ve done nothing since then. More or less, I don’t think anything at all has happened with the building since 2003. It just sits in limbo, abandoned and as forgotten as a building on the main street can be. The memory of a time when Jack’s Bar was actually open is fading away, and with no end in sight for the Ormsby House, its future seems bleak. I imagine it will just keep sitting there until something either miraculous or catastrophic happens. Either someone else will swoop in and buy it to fix it up, or in 20 years the Ormsby House will actually open and then the owners will get to work on Jack’s Bar, or the bracing will give way and the south wall will collapse onto Fifth Street. Those are the only possible outcomes for the bar now, and honestly they all seem equally likely (although I’d still put the Ormsby House reopening at the bottom of the list). Until one of those three happens, Jack’s Bar will stand, Always Open, always watching over us as we drive by.

2003 Pictures

In 2003, after the bar switched hands and when the demolition talks were being tossed around, I cruised by Jack’s Bar and took a few pictures. These photos capture a time when the new owners will still figuring out what they wanted to do with the place, and were dealing with the mess left over by the previous owners when they left.

Later that same year I came back, and they had cleaned up all the junk. They even put some of the neon that they were stripping off the Ormsby House inside to keep it safe during the demolition across the street.

2012 Pictures

I revisited Jack’s Bar 8 years later, in preparation for this article. Things have gone pretty far downhill, especially in the interior. The wall is still leaning, but because of their braces I don’t think it’s leaning much more than it was before. The inside is in rough shape, though. The floor is decomposing, the ceiling looks like it’s going to cave in, and the birds have definitely made a home. Overall it just looks like the place is rotting from the inside out, and every year that goes by makes the job of renovation that much tougher. And notice that the neon, which was supposed to be in a “safe place”, has been left to rot with the rest of the structure.