Tag: downtown

This seems to the be the year for English Pubs. First there was the news that a new pub, Firkin and Fox, will be opening in the ground floor of the St Charles Hotel. Jim Phalan of High Sierra Food & Beverage sent me this picture of him and his brother hanging a sign off the side of the hotel, and let me know that construction should be starting very soon (if it hasn't already) and the opening date is set for November 1st.

Now, if this was just another bar I'd have no interest in it. As a non-drinker I don't give a firkin' fox about a new bar opening up in town. But everything I've been hearing about this place paints it as a full restaurant too; it's part of a chain that's already been established in Canada, and is now making waves into the US. It reminds me a lot of T.S. McHugh's in Seattle, so we'll probably be sure to check it out when it opens.

And apparently there's another English pub that's opening this weekend, out Long Street just one block off Hwy 50. Nowhere Nevada reports that this new place looks amazing and they really put a lot of work into the decor. It's located at 1881 E. Long St, and it may or may not be called the Feisty Goat.

The Nevada Appeal has an article about a new English pub that is supposed to be going into the ground floor of the St. Charles Hotel this fall. The owners are also trying to spruce up the Third Street neighborhood and get some new shops in there. I've always thought that area around the St. Charles, and the St. Charles itself, has a lot of unused potential, so it's good to see some life coming back to it.

No Safe Place posted this pretty excellent aerial picture of Carson City last weekend, so I had to steal it and put it here. It has good views of the State Children's Home, Chinatown, and the Nye Building. There's also a whole lot of empty space to the north.

It's a great find, and if you follow the link he points out some of the big landmarks in the picture, as well as pointing to a biography of the photographer, John Nulty.

This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm trying to collect for my new Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection, which I hope to bring online sometime this summer. Provided I get a chance to finish building it.

The Reno City Council has decided (hat tip to Downtown Makeover) that the Virginia Street Bridge, in downtown Reno, should be demolished and rebuilt rather than retrofitted. The bridge dates back to 1905, but its chunky arches cause a lot of problems during flooding and high water. Dead trees and logs that are floating from upriver can't make it past the bridge, so they get stuck there. Which causes other debris to get stuck, which creates a dam that only makes the flooding worse. Not to mention weakening the bridge further. Mr. Jerz has video of this. They could have made changes to the bridge to make it more flood-friendly, but the cost on that was enormously high, so they decided to tear it down instead.

As a preservationist I should be outraged. Others are. But I'm not. It's a nice bridge, but it isn't fantastically great or anything necessarily special. There's supposedly historic ties to Nevada's divorce trade, but a lot of that could just be myth and Hollywood creating something that's not there. It's even listed on Preserve Nevada's Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places list. When you boil it down, it's just a bridge, and I don't get easily worked up about bridges, so I don't mind if it gets torn down. Let's save our energy for the buildings that need preserving.

And let's hope the replacement bridge is something memorable and worth being proud of. Best case scenario? The new bridge makes us forget all about the old bridge.

Here are some more of those aerial photos I found of Carson City. These are pretty fantastic, being shots of downtown from sometime around 1981-1984. You can see how far we've come in 25 years.

Click on any picture for a supersize version. And I like the last picture so much I pulled out a bunch of closeups and put those on their own page. Check it out.

Remember to look at that page of closeups.