Tag: reno

So now all of Carson City, Douglas County, Dayton, Washoe Valley, Fallon, and the Comstock have all been lumped together in the shadow of Reno and Lake Tahoe. In the new brand campaign, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada has taken what used to be called "Northern Nevada" or sometimes "Western Nevada" and renamed it to "Greater Reno-Tahoe". And they took $400,000 of our money to do it. They also came up with a lime green logo sporting the slogan "Can Do". The point is to get businesses and workers to move here from elsewhere in the country, and to put this snappy brand in front of them to get them to do so.

So far the response has been overwhelmingly negative.

Canned Poo.

Sounds suspiciously like a task on the "Apprentice".

$400,000 and that's all they can come up with?

Go back to your yuppie drawing board and leave us alone.

How do you say "can do" in Spanish?

Myrna has some thoughts, and the Nevada Appeal's editorial board. Most everyone says the same thing: generic, bland, could be used in any city in the Mideast. Kind of underwhelming.

Here's something completely awesome I found while rummaging through some tapes at my office. Some of you might remember Jack Joseph. He ran the late late movie on Reno's KOLO TV back in the 1980s, coming on after midnight, when the only audience was casino workers, alcoholics, and the unemployed, to air some godawful movie starring Suzanne Somers or Bert Convy. Last year Jack Joseph was inducted into the Nevada Broadcasters Hall of Fame, and the RN&R did a nice interview with him looking back on his career.

I was too young to remember much about Jack Joseph, I caught him once or twice near the end of his TV career showing Buckaroo Banzai. But today I unearthed a videotape of him at his peak. It's from February 1986, and the movie of the night is First, You Cry, a 1970s made-for-TV movie starring Mary Tyler Moore as a breast cancer survivor. I didn't watch the movie itself; it's all polyester and afros, and it looks absolutely horrible. But I did watch with rapt attention Jack Joseph himself, as a time capsule of what late-night 1980s TV was all about. Every single commercial seemed to be produced and voiced over by Jack himself. They're all for little stores around Reno, and undoubtedly every single one of them is out of business by now, 20 years later. I've pulled out just the parts where Jack is doing on-camera ads, ads for shoe stores and TV repair. Most of the places he is advertising were located in the "MGM Arcade". This may be more familiar to many of you as the basement of the Grand Sierra Resort (formerly Reno Hilton), where back in the 80s and 90s there used to be quite a shopping mall set up. The mall was closed to make way for convention space, First, You Cry was forgotten in the annals of bad 70's TV, and Jack Joseph retired to a quiet life of mailing out monthly coupon books. So goes the world.

There is so much to love about this video. First, the budget for the whole thing looks to be about $1.98. He's in the studio in front of a completely blue wall. He has a dog with him, for no discernable reason, and his first words to the camera, instead of a greeting or hello of some kind, is to basically say, "Look, here's a dog." Then he gets down to the business of introducing the movie, and all the while the camera is panning down and zooming in on the dog's face, until Jack is completely out of frame. 90% of the webcam videos on YouTube today have better production values than this. The rest of the clip is him hawking various stores in the MGM arcade. It's all horrible hideous clothing, scary dolls, and brass animals. Ugly ugly boots, is what he's trying to sell on TV. Then he slips in a plug for his own lounge act, at some casino that doesn't exist anymore, and finally ends the night by bringing the dog back and giving us his signature sign-off: "Blue skies, green lights, hope for peace."

No disrespect for Jack Joseph, the guy's an old pro and a Reno insitution. But this video's hilarious from beginning to end.

I've got more from this tape, too. Stay tuned.

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.

Abandoned plans for downtown Reno are nothing new. Just today I came across this drawing, plans for the "Reno Town Square" project, dated 1995. The Reno Town Square apparently would have been situated along the river, between Virginia and Center Streets. It would have involved filling in part of the river channel, closest to the Mapes, to create walking paths and shallow ponds. Also there would have been tree-lined public plazas on both sides of the river, with space for walking and sitting. Almost like an extension of the Riverwalk. The old Post Office itself would have been subdivided, and part of it set aside as restaurant space.

This was a pretty daring plan, especially for 1995. Most of the redevelopment we're familiar with today hadn't happened yet. The Holiday Casino had yet to be remodeled in to the Siena. The Mapes was still standing, boarded up. The Riverside Hotel was boarded up, and its western wing was still standing. The Regal Cinemas Century Riverside hadn't been built yet. I think the Riverwalk west of Virginia had been completed, though, and Wingfield Park was there, even if it hadn't yet had the mixed blessing of being decimated during the New Year's Flood, and subsequently remodeled. And it was before the Center Street Bridge was demolished and rebuilt.

Now that downtown Reno has been reborn, maybe it's time to dust off the Reno Town Square idea and give it another look. That block between Virginia and Center is still one of the ugliest stretches of the Truckee River, and it could use some sprucing up. This might be just the thing.

I missed this item about the Reno Hilton's old Keystone II movie theater being reopened as the Grand Sierra Cinema. Pretty cool news, even though I'm probably dating myself by mentioning that I saw the first Austin Powers movie there. And the awesome "The City of Lost Children"

They're showing second-run, budget movies, which is great because as far as I know, Reno hasn't had one of those theaters since the Greenbrae 8 shut down years ago. Prices have jumped from $1.50 to $3 in the intervening years, but I guess that goes right along with the price increase for first-run movies. It's something Carson's been missing for a long time too. Maybe when the Fandango Theater opens, the Northgate Cinema will be forced to go discount because nobody will want to pay full-price to sit in those shoebox theaters.

If you haven't been reading Myrna The Minx over at renodiscontent.com regularly, you have to go over there and check her out. She consistenly blows me out of the water on a weekly basis, both with the quantity and the quality of her posts. Thank god she only writes about Reno; if she lived in Carson City, I'd be out of a job.

And she mostly writes about downtown Reno, but just a couple of days ago she took a field trip to the Grand Sierra Resort (formerly the Reno Hilton, and Bally's and the MGM before that) to write an excellent report on what's been going on over there ever since the new owners took over and changed the name. Sounds like a lot of exciting stuff. I haven't really been to the Hilton GSR in years, but back in the 90s that was one of the favorite haunts of my crew. Back then we used to hang out at FunQuest, catch movies at the Keystone theater, walk around the shopping mall (back when it was really a shopping mall - before they gutted it and turned it into convention space), get milkshakes at Johnny Rocket's, and stay up all night bowling. The bowling alley cut its prices in half at midnight, so we'd always wait around because none of us had very much cash. I actually met my first girlfriend at that bowling alley. So I'm kind of invested in what happens to that property, even though I haven't been there in years, and it's great to see that there's a lot of good stuff in the works.

And it's great that Reno has bloggers like Myrna so I don't have to read the newspaper to find out what's going on.

I was going through some old pictures, and I found these. I thought it would be fun to post them. These are from the morning the Hotel Mapes in Reno was demolished, January 30, 2000. My friend and I went down to witness it (at something like 8:00 in the morning...jeez) and we wandered around for a while in the aftermath. A fine layer of dust settled on everything, and we scooped up some of it and put it in a jar. I'm proud to say I still have my Mapes Dust on my mantle.

The full set of photos, 17 in all, can be found at Flickr. Here are few highlights of The Pile.

Update: I guess I forgot to put up a "before" picture of the Mapes, for those who weren't around when it was still standing. This one is from Flickr user lasvegasmikey.

A hit tip to Yukon Sully (who tips his hat to Myrna the Minx) for pointing out this article about the latest incarnation of the ever-changing plans for the Reno Hilton. A development company is working on buying the place and converting it into condos, just like so, so, so many other hotels in Reno. But this new property, to be christened the “Grand Sierra Resort”, will be so much more than just condos. Restaurants, shopping, outdoor entertainment, water parks, fountains, and a pile of other yet-to-be-announced ideas (the designer prides himself on changing his mind often) will be part of the final package, when and if it ever gets built. The sale hasn’t even gone through yet, but they’re already taking $10,000 deposits from interested buyers, so at least the place will be partly occupied.

The Reno Hilton opened in 1978 as the MGM Grand, at the time the largest hotel/casino in the world. It went through a short stint under the Bally’s name in the late 1980s before becoming the Reno Hilton. It’s already a pretty impressive place, with a huge casino floor, several restaurants, a large showroom, gigantic conference center, a wedding chapel, video game arcade, shopping mall, bowling alley, and movie theater, all under one roof. I’m guessing most of that will be kept, or enhanced, as a way to bring in visitors. If any of this gets built at all. The designer, Dodd Mitchell, comes across in the article as one of those flaky artists who will get bored with the whole thing before it’s done. He’ll move on to something else, and sales will be below projections, and they’ll be lucky if they finish converting the tower that’s there now, much less building anything new.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I shouldn’t be pessimistic until it actually fails.