Tag: carsonvalleyplaza

The Old Navy store in Carson Valley Plaza closed last March, forcing Old Navy fans to drive to Reno if they wanted to shop there. It also left a big empty hole in that shopping center, which still had all the major anchor stores it opened with in 2003. We wondered how long the Old Navy storefront was going to sit empty, but it only turned out to be five months.

Now a Dollar Tree is moving into the space, providing everyone with their $1 shopping needs. I guess this kind of precludes my hope that Old Navy would turn its finances around and decide to reopen the store.

As promised, the Old Navy in the Carson Valley Plaza closed this week. Right now they're in the process of stripping out the last of the fixtures, and then the store is probably going to sit empty for some unknown amount of time. Given how long other stores in Carson have sat empty, it might be a while.

This blog used to the The Construction Blog. But now it's turning into The Store Closure Blog. It seems like I just wrote about Gottschalk's teetering on the edge of closing, and now today comes the news that Old Navy in the Carson Valley Plaza is closing. March 24th will be the last day, and for the next two weeks everything is being sold at close-out prices. The Old Navy stores in Reno (apparently there are three up there) will not be touched. Yet.

Old Navy is where we do a lot of our clothes shopping, so now we're going to have to burn more gas driving up to Reno. The store always seemed to have a lot of customers, I guess it's just a matter of the parent company needing to cut back, and striking the "weak performers" off the list.

This is the first major tenant to leave Carson Valley Plaza since it opened five years ago. The smaller stores have come and gone, but all the big anchors have been stable since the beginning. Maybe this is just the first step in a larger shakeup. Borders has been laying people off, and if they decide to cut back on locations Carson City might be one of the first to go.

This is also on top of the news from last week, a confirmation that the Riverwood shopping center across the street is in trouble. Like it wasn't already obvious from the fact that all work stopped three months ago so they could "re-negotiate utility contracts." Now under pressure from county commissioners, Riverwood developers have admitted that they won't start working again until later this year, possibly as late as fall. And the Kohl's has been pushed back to "next year".

Meanwhile, there's a big patch of bare dirt on the hill with nobody watering it down to control dust. The neighbors to the east aren't too happy about this. And I'm sure with the dry summer we have coming up they'll be even less happy in a couple of months. That kind of acreage can really kick up a hell of a dust storm, especially when the winds come whipping down Clear Creek canyon. I don't know if the county has any power to at least force them to water down their property to control dust.

So that's lots of bad news, and it makes you wonder how much more is coming.

The new Qdoba Restaurant up in Carson Valley Plaza opened Tuesday, and we went down to brave the rush for their first dinner. And there was quite a crowd there. It seemed a lot of people had heard about the opening and wanted to try out the new place. But the staff was ready for the crush of people, and even though the line was long, service was nice and speedy.

They sure didn't waste anytime building this restaurant. Back in July it was nothing more than a dirt lot. Now, four months later, it's open for business. That's what I call Getting The Job Done. We need to get these people working on the Ormsby House.

In July

It's not open yet, but they're getting close.

Carson City, or I should say Douglas County, is getting a new Qdoba restaurant soon. Qdoba is part of the wave of "fast casual" Mexican restaurants that have hit Reno in recent years, along with Baja Fresh and Bajio. Places like this are a good balance between going out for a full sit-down meal, like you would at El Charro or Mi Casa Too, or grabbing some overprocessed crap at a place like Taco Bell or Del Taco. The ingredients are fresh, you get your order fast, and while you're not paying 59 cents for a taco, they don't charge $12 for a combo plate either.

Qdoba is the first one of the trio I mentioned to break free of Reno and make their way down south to our area. Even though, out of the three, it's probably my least favorite. I'd be much more excited about seeing a Baja Fresh or Bajio in this space. But, since we're not getting those (not yet, anyway), Qdoba is a perfectly fine substitute. It's always fun to get a new and different place to eat, and I'm sure we'll be seeing the inside of this Qdoba more than I expect.

This construction also marks the last bit of empty space available in the Carson Valley Plaza. When they first built it four years ago, they had left a few pads open for future development. And one by one, they've all been filled in. We never got the sit-down restaurant I was hoping for, something to compete with the Chili's across the street, and there are only a couple of places in the whole shopping center that are local, non-chain restaurants. But there are a lot more dining choices than we had five years ago, so that's something to be thankful for.

I expect Qdoba to be open before the end of the year, at the rate they're building it. More tenants should be filling in the empty storefronts by then too.

It's been a couple of weeks since I've done a construction update post, so let's take a look around town and see what the builders have been up to.

I've been watching the work at Fifth and Stewart for a couple of months now. In that time they took what used to be a grassy field on the northeast corner of the intersection, plowed it under, and built the foundation for what looked like a pretty large building. I wasn't expecting how large it would be, though, until a couple of weeks ago when they started putting up the wall panels.

I'm thinking this is an expansion to the State Printing Office, which is right next door and which this new building actually touches. This two story beast is really going to change the landscape of this intersection.

Bodine's Casino has been working on the ground floor and parking garage for months and months now, and there's not much visible progress to show. But they did put up these signs at the corner advertising the fact that, yes, the new casino will keep the Bodine's name.

The First Presbyterian Church has been steadily working on their new expansion along Division Street.

The concrete for the floor has been poured, and you can see that it makes a semicircle around a central spot, presumably where the pulpit will be. The walls should start going up soon.

The Carson-Tahoe Quail Park is almost finished framing up its first building, and a second one has been started in the background.

The Marriott Hotel at Casino Fandango is almost done with framing too. Just a bit more to go on the roof, then they'll probably start putting on a layer of stucco.

And finally, construction is starting on the last empty parcel left in the Carson Valley Plaza. This is one of the lots in the middle of the parking lot, right next door to the Pita Pit building they just put up last year.

Already Qdoba Mexican Grill has been announced as one of the tenants, and the rest of the space is probably still unspoken for.

Photo of the proposed site for Riverwood.

The "Riverwood" shopping center has been an on-again-off-again project for years now. This is the shopping center that's going to be built in Douglas County at Topsy Lane, right across the highway from Best Buy and the Carson Valley Plaza. Originally it was going to be built by AIG Baker, the same developer who built the Carson Valley Plaza. But then they backed out of the deal. Later on it was picked up again by Riverwood Redevelopment LLC, which is owned by Jay Timon, who is a former employee of who? AIG Baker. So I guess he's pretty determined to get Riverwood off the ground, and now he's confident enough to start announcing a couple of the big anchor stores. And the biggest by far is Kohl's, the major department store that recently had been rumored to be moving in to the old Kmart building at the north end of town. I guess that deal fell through, or it really was a rumor, because they sound pretty sure of themselves that they'll break ground for Kohl's this fall, and be open by October 2008. This store is supposed to even be a smidge bigger than the one they opened a couple of years ago in south Reno, so I don't know how we rate.

The other retailer announced is Sportsman's Warehouse, which I'm not a sportsman so that doesn't really get my skin tingling. Kohl's doesn't get my skin tingling either, except to know that my wife will probably be making weekly pilgrimages to the place, so it's going to be a part of my life no matter what. And of course where you have major anchor stores, you also get a lot of other, smaller places clustering around, and a lot of the time those stores end up being more interesting than the anchors anyway. So things look like they're set to take off at Riverwood this year, so we'll have to keep an eye on it.

This is also right next door to the land where Jethro recently announced he wants to build his casino. And luckily the article was written by the Record Courier, not the Nevada Appeal, so there is none of the teeth-gnashing that inevitably gets inserted into their articles about how Douglas County is "stealing" these stores from Carson City. Instead we get teeth-gnashing about how the county is giving tax breaks to the developer to build the shopping center. So pick your controversy, I guess.

Out of all the county lines in Nevada, probably none have gotten more press than the Carson-Douglas county line in the neighborhood of Fuji Park. In less than a decade this part of town has exploded, being transformed from acre after acre of rolling sagebrush into one of the largest shopping complexes outside of Reno. The seemingly endless land at the northern slope of the Indian Hills has proven very attractive for developers, bringing in a Super Wal*Mart, Best Buy, Trader Joe's, Old Navy, Bed Bath and Beyond, Borders Books, In-N-Out Burger, Chilis, Del Taco, and dozens more retailers and restaurants. The twin shopping centers of Carson Valley Plaza and Clear Creek Plaza are one of the fastest-growing parts of Carson City, and there's more in the works. Another big shopping center is planned, along with housing developments, an auto mall, and maybe even a hotel-casino.

The part of the story where this gets interesting, though, is that none of this is actually in Carson City. That's because the county line was drawn at the bottom of the hill, not at the top, so all of this sloping land that you'd think would be part of Carson is really under the jurisdiction of Douglas County. And that means all the tax money from all these shopping and dining establishments goes south to Minden, not north to Carson, and this has caused the Carson City Supervisors no end of being pissed off over the last several years. But why is the county line at the bottom of the hill? Who's responsible for this? Let's see if we can go back in history and figure it out.

Millions of years ago (yes, we're going back that far), huge forces deep inside the Earth under Nevada caused two mountain ranges to rise up, the Carson Range and the Pinenut Mountains. In between the two of them a flat valley formed, and in the middle of that valley was a stubborn outcropping of rock that today we call Indian Hills. These hills kind of pinch off the valley in the middle like an hourglass, enough that from the ground it looks like there are really two separate valleys. Today we call these the Carson and Eagle Valleys.

In the 1850s and 60s when this area was first being settled by Americans, the two valleys were home to two different settlements, Genoa in the south and Carson City in the north. And so when the Nevada Territory was created in 1861, it was only obvious that two separate counties should be formed. The Carson Valley was made into Douglas County, named after Stephen Douglas who had lost the presidency to Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And the Eagle Valley was made into Ormsby County, named after Major William Ormsby who was killed by Paiutes at Pyramid Lake the same year. And where to draw the line between these two counties? At the Indian Hills, of course, the outcropping of rock that still divided the two valleys.

But things got complicated. Every one of Ormsby County's other borders was drawn at the top of a hill. Its border with Washoe County, to the north, followed the ridge of mountains separating the Eagle and Washoe Valleys. And the Lyon County border, to the east, was drawn at the top of the ridge between the Eagle Valley and Mound House. Ormsby County's western border, of course, was in the middle of Lake Tahoe at the California state line. So that left the drawing of the Ormsby-Douglas border, which by all logic should have been drawn along the crest of the Indian Hills. But it wasn't. Instead the county line was drawn to follow Clear Creek, a small stream that came out of the Carson Range right at the base of the Indian Hills. I don't know why they chose the creek to be the county line, but back then the Indian Hills were completely desolate so it didn't really matter where the line was.

The choice of Clear Creek as the county line made for some interesting stories. One I head was the story of a homesteader that lived right on the banks of the creek. He became increasingly frustrated with the taxes and leadership coming from Carson City, so one day he set out with his shovel and rerouted the creek to run around the other side of his house. And voila, just like that he was a resident of Douglas County.

Presumably sometime in the 20th century someone saw how silly it was to have the county line follow a seasonal creekbed, so they stretched it taut into the straight line we have today. But even now, you can see that it swings around Indian Hills instead of going over them, still more or less following the path of the creek.

This map shows the county line as a dotted line that comes down Spooner Summit, through Fuji Park, then keeps going until it hits Center Drive coming out of the Stewart Indian Community. It turns south and follows Center Drive for a bit, right along the extreme eastern edge of Indian Hills. The line seems to be avoiding the hills all together. After one last detour to the east, it finally meets back up with Clear Creek and follows the path of the Virginia and Truckee right-of-way all the way to the Carson River. Then it turns east again, heading straight into the mountains where it meets up with Lyon County.

This line seems to have been deliberately drawn to keep all of the Indian Hills inside Douglas County, but the why of that doesn't really make any sense to me. It could have easily been put at the crest of the hill, where modern-day Jack's Valley Road meets the highway. And then we wouldn't be having to sit through all of the teeth-gnashing we have today about how all the retailers and auto dealers are "defecting" to Douglas County, and how Douglas is "stealing" Carson's tax base. Maybe if the Ormsby County founding fathers had known how valuable the Indian Hills would someday be, they wouldn't have given them up so quickly.

Oh, and here's one more funny thing about the county line:

Look at the county line in this satellite picture, and see how it jogs around the old midget kart racetrack in Fuji Park. That's pretty funny, how the racetrack was so important to Carson that the line had to be drawn that way. Especially since, further to the west, parts of the park spill over into Douglas County. Even the Fuji Park Cemetery seems to be split in half by the line, almost to where James Johnson and John Thoroughman are buried in separate counties. But god forbid Carson would give up their racetrack!

It's been a long time since we heard a peep from Jethro, and I'd been wondering what he's been up to. That's Max Baer Jr, the actor who played Jethro Bodine on the Beverly Hillbillies. For 20 years now he's been trying to build a Beverly Hillbillies casino somewhere in Northern Nevada. First he tried Lake Tahoe, but found out the zoning laws up there pretty much don't allow you to build anything. Then he tried Park Lane Mall in Reno, but that deal fell apart for reasons that nobody wants to admit. Then he bought the old Wal*Mart building in Carson City, but that plan got derailed when JC Penney and the owners of the Southgate shopping mall flat out told him that he was not allowed to build a casino on the property. Several years and several court battles later, the old Wal*Mart still sits empty.

So, what should Jethro do next? Move to Douglas County of course! His latest plan is to build his fabled Beverly Hillbillies Mansion and Casino along Hwy 395 just on the other side of the Douglas County border, on the empty land right across the highway from Best Buy. A shopping center has long been in the works for that corner anyway, so Jethro's in negotiations to get his casino built kind of adjoining the center, away from the highway and down the hill a bit. He's also talking about building a convention center right next door, which is something that the Carson/Eagle Valleys are very much lacking.

The whole article this time around is pretty much positive about the project. There have been a lot of voices in the past saying the Beverly Hillbillies theme was too tacky for the area, what with its flaming oil derrick, shotgun wedding chapel, and redneck limousine. But this time there's none of that, just talk about how it would be an economic boom, bringing people to the area that might not otherwise come. Even in the Nevada Appeal's comment section, which is usually full of cynicism and bile, the only negative comments are directed towards Carson City for letting Jethro get away and losing more tax dollars. There's nobody bashing the concept itself anymore, so that either means we're growing more mature as a people, or we don't think there's a shot in hell he's actually ever going to build it, so there's no use debating the details. Your call.

The landscape has changed in South Carson over the last few years since Jethro announced his project. Back in 2003 the Casino Fandango was a piddly little place, taking up a couple thousand square feet in the corner of an empty warehouse. But now the Fandango fills that warehouse, is planning on expanding it, and has also built or started building a three-story garage, a movie theater, and a hotel. All the things that Jethro wanted to build right across the street. So moving to North Douglas County, which is pretty devoid of gaming, is probably a smarter move to get away from the stiff competitive juggernaut of the Fandango. Although the new site is really only a mile or two down the road, and it's practically on top of the new casino that's being built at the corner of Clear Creek and 395. Which, coincidentally enough, is going to be called Bodine's. How confusing do you think that will be to out-of-towners, to have "Jethro's" and "Bodine's" right across the street from each other?

And you'll notice I've been avoiding revealing what my own opinions are on the casino. That's because I'm a flip-flopper when it comes to Jethro. I used to think it was a little too Las Vegas for the area. My exact words were "We have a distinct lack of laughingstocks here in the capital city, and we rather like it that way. Jethro’s casino, if it really gets built, is just going to make us the punchline of a lot of jokes." But at the same time, look at the amount of people, and the amount of money, going into Las Vegas every day. There's something to be said about populism, and if the people want a Beverly Hillbillies casino, then dammit we better give it to them.

I guess the question is: is that what people really want?

More news as it comes in.