Tag: downtowncc

The Carson Times (run by those interlopers at the Reno Gazette) is doing far more Future of Downtown coverage than the Appeal is. Just yesterday they had two stories, Hot town, summer in the city, and Workgroups focus on retooling Curry Street corridor and beyond, about the Curry Street Promenade, the downtown library, even options for adding more high-density housing to the downtown area.

Carson Times has a photo gallery of the Curry Street Promenade. Apparently Curry Street is being slowly redeveloped, partly just to make Curry Street look better, but partly to try out a few of the design concepts that the city wants to use on Carson Street after the freeway is finished. What I notice about this Curry Street photo gallery is that many of the improvements are coming from private enterprise, not from the city. There are photos of the Firkin and Fox, and the new Bella Fiore Wines, and the new back patio that Doppelgangers recently completed. This is the way it should be. The city can make the streets and sidewalks look nice, but it's up to these businesses to make people want to come downtown. And we're actually seeing some nice stuff happening in that arena. So I'm optimistic for the future of downtown, and maybe by the time the freeway traffic gets off the street, we really will have a downtown worthy of standing on its own.

Carson Times: Don't give up on that new Carson City Library just yet. After the failed boondoggle that was the city trying to acquire the old Post Office on Plaza Street, it sounds like Carson is pursuing a more reasonable plan of building a brand new library building, probably on the site of the old V&T Shops one block north. Reasonable, but expensive. The library has no money to put up new buildings with, in fact they've recently had to cut hours and staffing levels. But it sounds like the Federal government has programs in place to help with redeveloping the neighborhoods that their buildings are located in. So maybe the Feds would give the city money to help out with building a new library and improving that part of town. Which is a good thing, because the city sure doesn't have any money to do any of this.

That whole part of town has been designated the "Roundhouse District", referring to the V&T Shops that used to be on the empty lot at Ann Street. The funny thing is that the shops were never called the "Roundhouse", because it wasn't round. It was square, so it was properly called just an enginehouse. I think it was usually known as the shops, or the Old Stone Fort.

There's a lot of land around there that can be improved, room for parks, fountains, even an amphitheater. If all these plans come to fruition it could really transform that part of town into something great. Of course, that's a lot of ifs. And plans in Carson City have a way of going from "if" to "whatever happened to", so maybe none of this will ever come to pass.

Here are a couple of cool pictures that were donated to the WNHPC. They are of the Arlington Hotel, which used to stand in Carson City across the street from the Nugget. It was torn down in 1966; it's a parking lot now.

I've just finished a big push to add all of Fred Nietz' photos to the Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection. If you remember, Fred posted a bunch of old photos to Flickr a couple of months ago, and I immediately started adding them to the site. All his photos can be seen on Flickr here. He had some great pictures of Carson City, some from the 30s 40s and 50s, but many of them from the 1980s, showing a side of town that is long gone, but that many of us can remember from fairly recent memory. It's fascinating to look through all these pictures, and to see that in just the course of 25 years most of the businesses lining Carson Street have changed. There are some constants, to be sure, but a lot of cases where the building has stayed the same, but the tenants are completely different.

So it took me two months, but I finally posted every one of Fred's photos to the WNHPC. It took a lot longer than it should because there were a lot of starts and stops along the way, and I just don't get to work on the site as much as I'd like to. But I really wanted to finish and get these pictures out there, so now it's done. Now I have to move on to all the other photo collections that are sitting on the shelf, collecting dust, waiting to go online. This is a huge project I've buried myself under; it seems like it's going to go on forever!

Anyway, here are some of the new additions. You can see them all at this link.

This was also cross-posted to the WNHPC blog.