Tag: reno

On May 1, 1950, V&T Engine #26 finished its daily run from Reno to Carson City and Minden and back, and was eased backwards into the Reno enginehouse near the banks of the Truckee River. The crew went through their normal routine of shutting her down, and headed home to rest up for the next day's run. The V&T was in its last days, and the line was scheduled to be shut down at the end of the month. #26 only had a few more weeks service ahead of her before she was to be put out to pasture and, most likely, dismantled for scrap. The best she could hope for, probably, would be to be placed in a park or at the state museum, on display as one of the few remaining relics of the glory days of the Virginia and Truckee. No matter what, her days of active service were almost over.

Half an hour after the doors of the old wooden enginehouse were locked, a fire alarm went up on the east side of Reno. Firefighters arrived to find the enginehouse engulfed in flames, with Engine 26 still stowed away inside. Some glowing ember or spark from the engine must have made its way into some flammable material left around the shop, and ignited the blaze. Firefighters did their best, but it was too late. The enginehouse was completely destroyed, and the engine reduced to a charred pile of scrap. Sentimentalists surmised that Engine 26, knowing of her fate, decided to go out in the most spectacular way possible.

Photographer Bill Beatty had taken pictures of the engine being put away for the night, so he was still close by and able to come back and take this dramatic photo.

More photos of the engine, and the Reno enginehouse, can be found at the WNHPC.

The fantastic thing about blogs is that you can devote them to the smallest of topics. That's what one Reno resident is doing with Reno Ballpark Update, and its companion blog. Reno Ballpark Update is an entire website devoted to just one thing: following the construction of a baseball stadium in downtown Reno. It looks like the site was set up soon after the ballpark was approved in September, and he's been posting little tidbits since then as the project goes forward. It seems like a pretty awesome piece of work by a guy who's nothing more than a fan of baseball. This is exactly the kind of thing we need to see more of around here, and I have a feeling we will.

I'm also jealous that this guy knows Photoshop (in fact, runs a graphic design company) and is therefore able to visually blow away everything I've ever created.

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.

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.

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.

If you ever needed a reason to stay away from Chuck E. Cheese, this might have been a good one.

When we saw the ambulance fighting its way through Reno midday traffic, we joked that somebody probably choked on the cardboard pizzas they serve there at Chuck E. Cheese. Then we drove by, and found out that's really what happened.

The person they carried out on the gurney was sitting up and conscious at least, so there were no fatalities. But let this remind you how dangerous bad food can be.

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.

There's another new blog in the Reno area, Reno Wire by Jim Scripps. It just got started this month, so there's not a lot of content yet, but we'll have to keep an eye on it.

It's amazing how much the Reno blogosphere has exploded in the last couple of years. When I started this site in 2005, I had to really scrape and scramble to put together a list of "Northern Nevada Bloggers". I had been doing it at my (now all-but-dead) personal site for several years, and I knew of a couple others in the area, but really the list was very slim when I first started it. But one day something clicked, and it seemed like every week, every day, there were new blogs sprouting up, mostly in Reno. Now, it's all going so fast that there's no way I could ever hope to keep up. So my list should be looked at as just a slice of what's really out there. NevadaBlogs is doing a better job, but even that isn't complete. It can't be complete, not with the explosion that's been going on in the "Sierra-o-sphere" (coined by Yukon Sully, back when his blog was still alive).

So, I actually think it's great. It's great when there are so many blogs that nobody can keep track of them or read them all. That's the way things should be. At least it's that way in Reno; we've got to work on Carson City next.

RENOvation published a pretty awesome photo tour of Old Southwest Reno. Just outside of downtown, this is probably the nicest neighborhood in all of Reno, with the biggest trees and the best homes. Here's a sample, but you've got to look at the whole gallery.

Reader Bob, from Random Nevada, sent in this picture of a window washer taken from the inside. I'm pretty sure this is in downtown Reno, at the Cal-Neva's skybridge across Center Street. That's the corner of Second and Center in the background, with Harrah's beyond. And of course one of Reno's ubiquitous pawn shops on the right.