Tag: downtown

I've often said that Minden probably has the best downtown in all of Western Nevada. It's small, just a few blocks, but there is a park right there, wide sidewalks, trees and landscaping, and some great old buildings. There is also no traffic, because the highway bypasses downtown one block to the north. Which makes it a perfect little downtown, but also makes it dead most days. It's only when there is a special event that there's any kind of real human presence downtown; the rest of the time it's like a ghost town. So much so, that the few businesses down there have a hard time of things. The Bank Parlor and Pub just closed this week because they weren't making enough money to stay open.

So how instructive is this for Carson City's downtown? When the freeway is finally finished, downtown will be bypassed, at least for people who are just passing through town. I can't imagine it will end up being this empty, but still. Is downtown Carson attractive enough to bring people in even when they don't have to be there? I think Carson has an advantage over Minden in that it's already established, with many more restaurants and shops, and it's bigger so there are more attractions to draw people in. But with everybody talking about how great it will be when Carson City's downtown is bypassed, we need to keep in mind that the West is littered with downtowns that died after a freeway was built and all the action moved to the edge of town. Carson City has to keep its focus on making sure people want to come downtown, and that means making sure it never gets a chance to turn into a ghost town like Minden.

These pictures were actually taken during a special event. For Minden, this is crowded.

Some time ago I was expressing how desperately I hoped they would get rid of the turquoise on the old Lucky Spur building as it underwent its transformation into Doppelgangers Bar and Grill. Well, I got half my wish. The turquoise on Carson Street still remains, but it has been banished from the side entrance and sign on Proctor Street.

Doppelgangers opened this month, but I haven't had a chance to try out the food yet. I only ate at Stew's once, and I can remember it was kind of a grim experience. Hopefully things are better with the new owners. You also can see from this photo that the most abused sign in Carson has gotten yet another facelift. This time it shed the turquoise, and the Stew's lettering, and now just barely manages to squeeze in the word "Doppelgangers".

Also today comes the news that Alan Adams, who owns Doppelgangers and also the Carson Nugget, has bought the old Stewart Title building directly to the south across Proctor Street from the Lucky Spur. Adams says he has no idea what he's going to do with the building yet, but please please please let it involve some major remodeling and a facelift. Because damn:

These diamonds haunt my nightmares.

This building was put up in 1962 as Security National Bank, and a comtemporary newspaper article praises it as being "modern in every respect." But remember, this is the 1960s we're talking about, when "modern" was a synonym of "ass-ugly". If Alan Adams can be the one to make those diamonds go away, he will be the town hero.

Here's what was at that corner before the bank.

The Eagle Market and Tim's Liquor House shared the corner building. Next door is Sprouse-Reitz, which moved from downtown into the Carson Mall before closing completely in the 1990s.

I found a few good pictures of Old Downtown Reno on Flickr the other day:

The old mural at Harold's Club. There's a closer view of it here.

The Mapes sign. The Mapes closed in 1982 but wasn't demolished until 2000.

The Nevada Club entrance, soon before it was torn down.

The Nevada Club in its neon heyday.

More details have been revealed about the fate of the Lucky Spur building, which until recently housed Stew's Sportatorium at the corner of Carson and Proctor. The building has been bought by the owner of the Carson Nugget, Alan Adams, and will reopen next week as Doppelgangers Bar and Grill. It doesn't sound like the new place will be substantially different than Stew's was; it will still have a brew pub, pool tables, and video poker machines in the front, and a restaurant in the back. But there is all-new ownership and management in place, and sometimes that's all it takes to make the difference between a flop and a hit.

And here's hoping that they finish removing the turquoise on the facade as part of the grand reopening. That would be a nice early Christmas present to downtown Carson City.

Apparently the sign in the windows of the Kitzmeyer Furniture building (former home of Java Joe's) advertising a Canadian sports bar is just a practical joke. The problem is that nobody, not even the owner of the building, knows how the sign got up there.

The real new tenant of the space, which was home to Joe Mango's Cafe for about a month, is Kim Lee's Sushi & Teri, which is currently located in the old Greyhound bus depot one block away at the corner of Telegraph and Plaza. This is a good move, I think, because it will bring more visibility to what I consider to be the best sushi place in the area. Not that I've had sushi for years and years; it's hard to sidle up to a sushi bar when you've got a wild three-year-old running in circles around the restaurant. But I'm sure we'll make it back one day, and when we do, it will undoubtedly be to Kim Lee's in the Kitzmeyer Building.

And what about Joe Mango's? Why did it close so fast? Apparently, the owner was never interested in running a restaurant. He always intended on reselling the lease, but he had to open and operate his own place for a little while before he could. Hence, Joe Mango's.

This also means we'll never get to find out exactly what a Canadian Sports Bar is. I envision 24-hour hockey and all the Tim Horton's donuts you can eat.

Did you have any idea that the second Reno arch, the one that stood over Virginia Street from 1964 to 1987 (pictured above) was moved to a another town and transformed into their official town arch? I had no idea until I read this article by Guy Rocha, all about town slogans and welcoming arches.

The arch with the octagon letters was removed in 1987 to make way for the third arch, which is still there today. At one point in time the old arch could be seen sitting in a boneyard near the Reno Hilton; the orange and yellow letters were easily visible from the freeway. But then it disappeared, and I never knew what happened to it.

What happened was that in 1995 the arch was moved to Willits California, near the coast in Redwood country. It was affixed with the Willits name and the slogan "Gateway to the Redwoods", and there it has sat spanning Hwy 101 for twelve years now.

Just another Nevada artifact that's gotten away from us.

So the remodeling/renovation of Stew's Sportatorium (formerly the Lucky Spur) continues. This is kind of a puzzling remodel job, because the whole place was just gutted and rebuilt a couple of years ago, after sitting empty for more than two decades. So why remodel it again?

The Lucky Spur in 2003, before the first renovation.

There's a lot of confusing stuff happening over at Stew's lately. The sports bar has been having some financial difficulty lately. They've been fined for not paying unemployment insurance premiums, been put on the delinquent tax list for not paying property taxes, and had a manager embezzling money from them. The latest is that they're now being sued by a food supplier for not paying their bills. The building and business was put up for sale in April, and although the Nugget was interested and a sign appeared on the marquee saying "under new ownership," the company denies that they're going to sell, saying instead that they're working with a new partner. So it's hard to pin down exactly what's happening when even the newspaper is having trouble getting the full story.

There is one thing I can say for certain is happening, though: the renovation is going forward. I saw people going in and out of the building just this morning, and there are signs that they'll be changing the outside appearance at least a little bit. One of the most unfortunate things about the renovation they did a couple of years ago was the color scheme. Somehow they thought that the natural brick facing on the building would go well with a splash of turquoise. They were, of course, dead wrong, but that didn't stop them from painting the signs turquoise and putting up some turquoise stucco around their side door. It was hideous. Just look.

The turquoise marquee on Stew's.

But, as you can see from the following picture, the stucco around the doorway has been painted a more somber and sane brown. One can only hope the rest of the signage is soon to follow. Maybe not quite that shade of brown, but something a little more welcoming.

The sign is still turquoise, but the stucco has been painted brown.

And another interesting note about that sign, the one above the side entrance, is that it used to be the main sign out on Carson Street for the casino. It was later moved around to the side where it is now. Take a look at this postcard from the late 50s, and see the same sign advertising the Silver Spur.

There's another article in the Nevada Appeal today about the narrowing of Carson Street that the city is planning on doing after the freeway is built. The plan is to narrow Carson Street to two lanes from Fifth to William Streets, which would be the whole downtown core by the Nugget and the Capitol. The idea then would be to widen the sidewalks and make the area more friendly to pedestrians. Because right now walking along Carson Street is not a fun experience. You're wedged in between the imposing storefronts and a heavy iron fence, walking inches from the passing cars, with an occasional semi truck threatening to sweep you from your feet. So widening the sidewalk would give you more room to move around, and maybe even give restaurants like B'Sghetti's room for a couple of outside tables.

Of course there are objections to the plan, most of them saying that there will still be tons of traffic going through downtown after the freeway is built, so Carson Street will be a horrible mess. But the article points out the one thing that I didn't consider, but should have. If Carson Street through downtown is a horrible mess, everybody's going to stay away from it. People who really have somewhere to go will know not to use Carson Street, they'll find a way to get around it. So cutting those cars out will reduce the amount of traffic downtown to a manageable level, because the only cars driving through downtown will be the ones that actually want to be there. The article calls this making Carson Street "less attractive" to cars, which in turn will make it more attractive to pedestrians.

Of course another piece that needs to fall into place is for attractive businesses to move to downtown, that make people want to go there in the first place. Right now there's not much to draw you in: there are a few restaurants and a couple of charming gift shops, but much of downtown is pawn shops and casinos, and that's not going to make tourists want to flock to downtown. There need to be the kind of businesses downtown that make you want to stroll from one shop to the next, and that's something the government can't just magically make appear. We're all going to have to work together to make it happen if we want a nice downtown.

Plus, if you look at the article (or have a copy of today's newspaper), look at the photo they used to demonstrate the way Carson Street used to be, with two lanes. Look familiar?

Downtown Makeover has been doing more frequent "downtown walks" lately, little mini photo tours of downtown Reno. Part construction updates, part snapshots of life downtown, they're always fun to read through. Plus, it keeps me up on what's happening in downtown Reno. In my early 20s, I used to go there nearly every weekend with my friends, walk along the river or Virginia Street. But now I get to downtown Reno maybe once or twice a year. So I'm having to live its rebirth through sites like Downtown Makeover and others.

So here's his latest walk, just from this morning.

I was sifting through some old papers at my house the other day when I unearthed this. Now, to most people this just looks like a tattered piece of trash, and they wouldn't hesitate to throw it away. But as soon as I saw it I remembered just what it was, and the story of how I got it.

This, obviously, is a $2 food credit voucher for the Money Tree casino. It's pretty beat up, but that's because it's almost as old as I am. The Money Tree was in downtown Reno, a spin-off of the Mapes Hotel and Casino, just a couple of blocks away down by the river. Originally the Money Tree occupied a small space on the west side of Virginia Street, near the arch. It was opened in 1969 to bring in some extra money to the Mapes family, and it did very well at that. So well, in fact, that in 1978 the Money Tree moved to a larger building at the corner of Second and Sierra Streets, at the same time business at the Mapes was declining.

The new Money Tree was actually part of the big Reno casino boom of 1978, which saw the MGM Grand (now Grand Sierra), the Comstock (now Riverwalk Towers) the Sahara Reno (Formerly Golden Phoenix, now being converted to the Montage condos), Circus Circus and the Money Tree all open within a few weeks of each other. The Sahara, Circus Circus and Money Tree actually all opened on the same night, July 1, 1978, and all of downtown celebrated with a star-studded floating party. On the same night word came that Bill Harrah, who had pioneered the idea of the modern casino and first put Reno on the map, had died. So in a way it was the passing of the old guard to the new, a new generation of downtown casinos being born all at the same time.

Now, of course, that generation has been wiped out and another, even newer, guard has taken over. Out of those five properties in the big casino boom of 1978, only Circus Circus still operates under its original name. The Comstock and Sahara have given over to the latest boom, the Reno condo craze. The MGM has gone through several owners and name changes: Bally's, Hilton, and now Grand Sierra Resort. But it was the little Money Tree, the property that was supposed to save the Mapes, that had the fastest flameout. The casino ended up being a drag on the parent company's bottom line, because it didn't have parking or hotel rooms like the other new properties, and the 1981 recession was the final nail. Both the Mapes and the Money Tree closed in 1982. The Mapes was demolished 18 years later, and the Money Tree's location has gone through several tenants. There was Eddie's Fabulous 50's, where you could find jukeboxes and poodle skirts and Elvis impersonators (and, for a short time, a DeLorean. I never understood how that fit the theme). Then, during the late 90s, the building was opened as the Reno Live dance club. Most recently it's been transformed into the 210 North nightclub.

As for the food credit vouchers, the way I heard the story was that near the end, the company was doing so bad financially that they were handing these vouchers out to the employees in lieu of pay. I don't know if that's entirely true, but it sure makes for a good story.

And what about my lonely voucher in particular, and why it's so beat up? I actually found this scrap of paper lying on the street on a cold January morning back in 2000, the day the Mapes was demolished. For 18 years the voucher must have sat in one of the rooms, a forgotten piece of trash in a condemned building. The violence of the blast that day expelled it out an open window during the Mapes' final seconds, sending it fluttering down to the street in safety. So it may be small, but this food credit voucher to me is a souvenir of the Mapes, the demolition, and of Old Reno itself.