The Top Five Moments for Historic Reno in 2014

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As Reno’s revitalization continues to gain momentum, our city’s rich heritage is emerging as one of its most valuable assets. From digital projects to the renovation and repurposing of key historic properties, the year 2014 was marked by an increasing (and exciting!) realization of how our city’s unique past can be an integral, and irreplaceable, component of its continuing reinvention. Here are five of the year’s top stories in Reno’s heritage.

1. The Launch of Reno Historical

On May 9th, the anniversary of Reno’s original land auction in 1868, the new smart phone app and website Reno Historical launched. The map-based multimedia platform, a collaborative effort by most of Reno’s history-related organizations, allows users to explore Reno’s heritage through stories, images, audio, and video clips. The project continues to expand, with the regular addition of new locations and multimedia components. Look for the addition of historic sites throughout Midtown and the Wells Avenue district in 2015.

2. The opening of Heritage restaurant

While not housed in a historic building (by most standards, anyway), Mark Estee’s Heritage restaurant, which opened in May, was significant to Reno’s heritage for a number of reasons not limited to the establishment’s name. Located in the Whitney Peak Hotel, the old Fitzgerald’s casino building, the restaurant champions the city’s history in everything from the menu’s inspiration to the wait staff’s denim uniforms (a nod to the 1871 invention just a block away of Levi’s riveted jeans). Additionally, the establishment of a non-gaming hotel in the heart of the city’s casino core bodes well for the return of the city center to a more diverse array of businesses and attractions for both tourists and residents.

3. Historic UNR Dorms Saved from the Wrecking Ball

Citing seismic concerns, a press release issued by the University of Nevada, Reno on May 29th indicated that two of the university’s historic dormitories, Lincoln Hall and Manzanita Hall, might be “removed” in whole or part.  Immediate public outcry to save the two 19th century buildings, both listed in the National Register of Historic Places, included a student-led petition, an editorial in the Reno Gazette-Journal, and a flurry of activity on the part of local and state preservation groups. Just weeks later, UNR President Marc Johnson announced that both Lincoln Hall and Manzanita Hall would be preserved.  Bids to design the initial plan to convert Lincoln Hall into office space are due January 15.

4. The Renovation and Reuse of Reno’s Downtown Post Office

Reno’s historic downtown post office closed its doors in December of 2012 after 78 years of operation. Designed by Nevada’s pre-eminent architect, Frederic DeLongchamps, the Art Deco/Art Moderne building was purchased by the Reno Redevelopment Agency and sold to a local development group. Led by local resident Bernie Carter, the building’s new owners worked closely with Nevada’s State Historic Preservation Office and the City of Reno’s Historical Resources Commission to ensure that its renovation would retain the structure’s historical integrity. Renamed Fifty South Virginia, its historic address, the beautifully restored building’s office spaces are now open for lease.

5. The Renovation of the Nevada-Oregon-California Railroad Depot

Vacant for more than a decade, the Nevada-California-Oregon Railroad Depot on historic East 4th Street was long the subject of hand-wringing by locals who feared the building would be lost to deterioration or demolition.  Another Frederic DeLongchamps design, the historic 1910 depot was purchased in 2013 by a long-time Nevada family. Following an extensive renovation, it reopened on New Year’s Eve, 2014, as a combined brewery/distillery/restaurant, named the Depot Craft Brewery and Distillery. The property promises to play a key role in the reactivation of East 4th Street, recently named the Old Brewery District by the Regional Alliance for Downtown.

Stay tuned for my list of five issues in Historic Reno to look for in 2015!

Why You Should Care About Reno’s History

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Why do I care about Reno’s history? If you read through my blog, the answer is pretty clear. Researching and interpreting Reno’s history for the public has become central to my professional life, and something of a personal crusade. You can read more about how all of that started here and elsewhere on this site, and I hope you do!

Ignite Reno, Cargo, November 20, 2014

But why should you care about Reno’s history? I addressed that question recently in a talk for Ignite Reno, held at Cargo in the Whitney Peak Hotel in downtown Reno on November 20th. If you’re not familiar with the format, Ignite presenters are given five minutes to speak on a subject of their choice–something that really fires them up–backed by 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. On this night, fourteen of us spoke on topics ranging from digital publishing to how lessons from cycling can make us a better community.

Ignite Reno speakers, Cargo, November 20, 2014

I geared my talk toward the local Reno audience, but my general points can apply to any location. History is every place’s most unique asset, and caring about it, promoting it, and preserving it, can help us make our places more walkable, more meaningful, and more community-oriented.

You can watch the 5-minute video here and the full powerpoint presentation here: Ignite Reno Powerpoint.  I hope you enjoy, and perhaps feel a little more inspired to care about the history in your community, wherever that may be.

Nevada Writers Hall of Fame

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Earlier this week I was deeply honored to receive the Silver Pen Award on the same night that two wonderful writers, Ron James and Shaun Griffin, were inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Several people have asked for copies of my remarks, and so I include them here, as doing so provides me yet another opportunity to acknowledge those who have influenced my writing career and to thank many others who have encouraged and inspired my writing so far. I am filled with gratitude.

Nevada Writers Hall of Fame ceremony, November 13, 2014

Thanks to all of you for being here. Thanks to the selection committee. Thank you so much to the Friends of the University Libraries for this honor and for all the work that you do. Libraries need friends.

Libraries have been very good to me. I wanted to become a writer because of a lot of people I met in libraries. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Louisa May Alcott. Dr. Seuss. Mark Twain. Henry David Thoreau. Edith Wharton. Nathaniel Hawthorne. William Shakespeare. Virginia Woolf. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Walt Whitman. I could go on.

I wanted to become a writer because I wanted to move people the way I had been moved by these authors’ words and to transport people the way they had transported me.

But I wanted to become a writer of history in particular because of one person: Wallace Stegner. Wallace Stegner is the reason I went to graduate school and the reason I study and write about the American West.

I am not a native Nevadan, but I am a westerner. And like a lot of westerners, I am from a lot of different places. My parents, who are here tonight, are from Alaska and Washington state. We lived in southern California and Utah. We spent many years in New York but ended up back in the West.

I had been aware of Wallace Stegner’s work for a long time, but I didn’t start to read his work in earnest until his death in 1993. And once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. Not only did his writing transport me, but he felt like a kindred spirit. Like me, he was a child of the American West. Like me, he had spent a lot of time in Salt Lake City and Palo Alto. Like me, he had moved around and had no single place to call home. He understood the tension between the exhilaration of rootlessness and the hunger for stability and a sense of place.

And he pointed out that that wasn’t just the plight of a few individuals—that was part of the West’s intrinsic nature. And it had consequences.

Stegner wrote that the American West is most susceptible to losing a sense of place.  As he wrote, “Many western towns never lasted a single human lifetime. Many others have changed so fast that memory cannot cling to them; they are unrecognizable to anyone who knew them twenty years ago. And as they change they may fall into the hands of planners and corporations, so that they tend to become more and more alike. Change too often means stereotype.” As a result, he said, “Communities lose their memory along with their character.”

I wanted to understand how that could happen and was happening, how a community could lose its memory, and its character, especially in the West, where that character was so strong, and so tied to this incomparable landscape and these immense open spaces.

That’s what first brought me to Reno. I wanted to understand how this most unique of western places was struggling with its identity, and in its quest to find secure economic footing, was in danger of losing its identity and its character. The city had undergone so many changes, some so suddenly, that the past was in danger of being completely erased and forgotten.

Then as I stayed longer, as I learned more, as I became part of this community, I wanted to help do something about that.  I wanted to learn not just how a community could lose its memory, but how it could get it back. I wanted to help reverse that process, to strengthen a sense of place and make the city more meaningful to people through understanding its past.

And in my writing and my public history work, that is what I am trying to do, to help strengthen our understanding of the places where we live. I want to reach people wherever they are—in a library, in their home, on the computer, in a park, waiting for the bus.  I want to be a part of the effort to preserve individual memories, to strengthen our collective memory and create an ethic of care about this place and about each other.

And that is what Wallace Stegner stood for, too. He was not just a writer and a scholar; he was an activist. He didn’t just want to explain the West. He wanted to inspire people to act, to save the places they cared about.

I have now lived here for eleven years, which is the longest I’ve lived anywhere. I know this place better than I know any place. Reno has become my home and my inspiration.

I am immensely grateful to Phil Boardman for bringing me to Nevada as a postdoc in Core Humanities in 2003. I’m grateful to Tom King for recommending me to direct the University of Nevada Oral History Program, a job that I absolutely treasured from start to finish. And I want to thank all of my friends and colleagues—so many of you are in this room—who have encouraged and inspired me.

Thanks to my parents who have read everything I’ve written since I was five. And to my husband, Mark, another westerner, who I met ten years ago last week at the Nevada Museum of Art. No one could be more supportive.

There was a time not so long ago when I wasn’t sure there was a place for me here or if this was what I was supposed to be doing. But the past year has shown me that there is and I am.

This award means the world to me, and I accept it as confirmation that I’m on the right track, and encouragement to stay on it. I am so proud to be the warm-up act for the two gentlemen we are truly here to honor tonight.

Thank you so much.

One Sound State

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In light of this week’s announcement that Tesla has chosen Northern Nevada as the site for its new $5 billion battery “gigafactory,” it seems timely to recall the state’s long history of luring residents and potential investors with its unparalleled tax advantages. Perhaps the most well-known attempt was the “One Sound State” campaign of the 1930s, which hoped to attract wealthy new residents to Nevada by promoting it as a conservative tax haven.

The One Sound State campaign directly targeted more than 10,000 wealthy individuals, suggesting they move to Nevada for tax purposes.

As a promotional strategy, the “One Sound State” campaign was driven largely by local concern that the only Reno most Americans knew was the image purveyed by the media–as a capital of gambling and divorce. Its strategy was to convince the very wealthy of the state’s economic “soundness” by stressing the lack of numerous taxes, from state income tax to inheritance taxes.

Its methods could not have been more overt. In 1936, the First National Bank of Reno, in conjunction with the Nevada State Journal, published a pamphlet that it sent to a select list of 10,000 wealthy prospects, outlining Nevada’s fiscal advantages, and dropping the names of millionaires like Max C. Fleischmann, who had already made the move. As a reporter for Collier’s magazine noted, “The Nevadans aren’t going to play up this gay, devil-may-care side of life in their state anymore. They’re going to put the emphasis on civic respectability.”

So did it work? Undoubtedly. Numerous millionaires moved their residences to Nevada, although many clustered around the shores of Lake Tahoe in elegant homes far removed from Nevada’s urban centers. The long-term benefits to the state are difficult to calculate, but one point is clear: the charitable foundations founded by some of those millionaires and their heirs (among them, Max C. Fleischmann, E.L. Cord, Wilbur D. May, Nell J. Redfield) have injected hundreds of millions of dollars into the state’s educational system, cultural institutions, and non-profits.

If you’re in Reno, you can learn more about these millionaires and their foundations at the Wilbur D. May Museum at Rancho San Rafael Park in an exhibit on display through September 21st called “Rush to Reno: Millionaires in the One Sound State.” For more info, visit the museum’s website.

So will the massive tax breaks and incentives offered to Tesla come back to benefit Northern Nevada a hundredfold? Only time will tell. It’s a major achievement, and also a leap of faith. But that’s Nevada, land of the eternal gamble. You really can’t expect this state to operate any other way.

Eat, Drink, and Be Historic!

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This year marks the second annual historically-themed Dine the District event, put on by the great folks in Reno’s Riverwalk District. This year, we have the added benefit of our new mobile app, Reno Historical, which will allow everyone to learn more about the historic sites throughout the area as they eat, drink, and stroll around. Additionally, I’ll be leading a guided tour just before the event for a small group. The date is Saturday, August 9th, and you can buy tix in advance here. Join us!

Buy tickets in advance for the Historical Dine the District event on August 9th.