The Crossing
In May of 1868, Myra Lake could tell by her husband's hands that the land was already sold. The day Reno became a town.
Toná Family130 stories. 158 years. A downtown's complete history, told through the people who built it — one fictional family at a time, grounded in documented history. A new story every weekday.
In May of 1868, Myra Lake could tell by her husband's hands that the land was already sold. The day Reno became a town.
Toná FamilyA land speculator from San Francisco arrives at the first Reno lot auction and meets a man who will not be outbid.
Kellerman FamilyThe railroad is finished. Wei Ah Lum hears about it secondhand, from men who weren't there either. He looks at the river and decides to stay.
Ah Lum FamilyOtto Kellerman steps off a train in Reno intending to pass through, and stays to build something that will outlast him.
Kellerman FamilyBridget Fitzgerald arrives in Reno with forty-two dollars and a letter of introduction addressed to a man who has already left for Sacramento.
Fitzgerald FamilyJames Doyle comes down from Virginia City with six years of silver country in his hands and finds Otto Kellerman's saloon exactly where he needs it.
Kellerman & DoyleGuadalupe Morales watches the river rise from his room on First Street and helps a stranger move a chest without being asked.
Morales FamilyMargaret Wells walks up a slope of sagebrush to find a building that is not finished and a university that has not yet opened, and puts her name in a ledger anyway.
Reinholt FamilyThe law arrived in Reno on a Thursday, by telegraph, the same way everything arrived.
Ah Lum & Fitzgerald FamiliesPatrick Reilly had not planned to become a lawyer in a town that barely needed one.
StandaloneRosa Morales heard the river before she saw it.
Morales & Kellerman FamiliesThomas Gray set type the way other men played piano -- by feel, without looking, his fingers finding the right letter in the case before his eyes had finished reading the word.
StandaloneWilla walked to the river the morning after the law was signed and stood where her mother had stood thirty-four years before, watching something be taken.
Washoe FamilyJames Ah Lum watches the Southern Pacific depot from his father's laundry on Christmas Eve, counting trunks and watching trains he has never taken.
Ah Lum FamilyAgnes Park, daughter of a cattle rancher, walks up the hill north of Reno and becomes the first in her family to attend the University of Nevada.
StandaloneHelen Marsh arrived in Reno on the four o'clock train from the east, carrying two trunks, a hatbox, and a marriage she intended to leave on the courthouse steps.
Fitzgerald FamilyGeorge Turk checked the dining room twice before the doors opened, the way he checked everything twice, because in a hotel the difference between good and adequate was the things nobody noticed.
StandaloneNora Gaines, president of a local women's club, navigates the social friction and opportunity created by the influx of wealthy Eastern divorce-seekers.
StandaloneFrances Cole arrived in Reno on a Wednesday in October of 1921 and went directly to her attorney's office, because she was not a woman who wasted time.
StandaloneDolores Park sold a pair of boots to a woman from Connecticut on a Tuesday morning in September, and by the time the woman left the store, she was walking differently.
Morales FamilyFrank Kellerman stood behind the bar on a Friday evening in December of 1918 and poured a whiskey for a cattleman from Lovelock and thought about the fact that in three days he would not be able to do this anymore.
Kellerman FamilyClara Reinholt signed the lease on a Tuesday in March of 1920, standing in the empty storefront on Virginia Street with the landlord and a pen and the particular feeling of a person who has just committed to something that cannot be taken back without cost.
Reinholt FamilyThe ranch sat in a fold of the Truckee Meadows, seven miles south of Reno, at the end of a dirt road that turned off the main highway and ran through sagebrush for a quarter mile before arriving at a gate made of peeled pine poles.
Morales FamilyThe alley ran parallel to Commercial Row, between Sierra and Virginia Streets, and in the years before Prohibition it had been called Douglas Alley, which was the name on the city maps, but during the dry years the people who used it most had taken to calling it Bottle Alley, which was not on any map but was accurate.
Kellerman FamilyThomas Ah Lum stood in the temple at the intersection of First and Lake Streets and listened to the silence. It was a Tuesday morning in October 1926, and he had just finished sweeping the floor around the altar.
Ah Lum FamilyRay Callahan stood in the bed of the truck at dawn, looking at the steel arch that the crews had finished bolting together the night before. It rose at the corner of Commercial Row and Virginia Street like something that had no right to exist in Reno, Nevada.
StandaloneMichael Fitzgerald had been twelve when his grandfather died, and he remembered the funeral more for the rain than for any words spoken over the grave. Now, at twenty-eight, standing in the iron frame of what would be the Riverside Hotel, he understood that Patrick had built something different from what Michael was building.
Fitzgerald FamilySamuel stood on Virginia Street on a Thursday morning in March 1929, watching the men on ladders bolting new letters to the arch. The steel frame had been there since 1926, spelling RENO in electric lights at the intersection of Commercial Row.
Washoe FamilyJoseph Toná walked down Virginia Street on a Thursday night in March 1931, the desert wind carrying the smell of sage and disturbed earth. The Bank Club was lit up like something out of a magazine, its windows blazing.
Washoe FamilyFrank Kellerman stood outside the Reno National Bank on a Tuesday morning in November 1932 and watched the line grow. It stretched from the front entrance on Virginia Street past the druggist and around the corner toward Commercial Row, maybe sixty people deep and getting longer by the minute. Some of the people in line he recognized. The man who ran the shoe repair on Center Street.
Kellerman FamilyRosa Morales heard the news on the radio in the kitchen of the Golden Hotel, standing over a pot of beans with a wooden spoon in her hand and the evening service an hour away. The Twenty-first Amendment had been ratified. National Prohibition was over. It was December 5, 1933, a Tuesday, and the country was allowed to drink again.
Morales FamilyFrances Cole walked into the new Federal Building on South Virginia Street on a Monday in October 1934, carrying two envelopes and the small persistent ache in her left hip that had started the previous winter and had not gone away. The building was unlike anything else in Reno. She stopped inside the entrance and looked up.
StandaloneClara Reinholt noticed the new club on a Wednesday in June 1935, walking north on Virginia Street after closing her dress shop for the evening. It occupied a single storefront, narrow and unremarkable, the kind of space that had been a laundry or a shoe repair before the gambling law changed everything. Through the open door she could see an eight-foot roulette wheel painted in bright colors and a few slot machines along the wall. A man stood outside on the sidewalk, calling to passersby.
Reinholt FamilyMichael Fitzgerald stood knee-deep in the Truckee River in September 1936, setting forms for the concrete that would become the retaining wall along the south bank of Wingfield Park. The water was low and cold, running clear over the gravel bottom, and the morning sun had not yet reached the channel. He could feel the current against his shins, steady and patient, the way the river always was when it was not flooding.
Fitzgerald FamilyNora Fitzgerald stepped off the Southern Pacific train at the Reno depot on a Thursday afternoon in October 1937, holding a leather case in one hand and a hat in the other. She had ridden two nights from Pennsylvania Station, changing at Chicago, and the air she breathed now was high and dry and tasted of sage and something metallic she could not name. She was twenty-eight years old. She was here to dissolve a marriage that had lasted four years, and she had six weeks in which to do it.
Fitzgerald FamilyEddie Morales rode the morning bus from Sparks into Reno on a Wednesday in February 1938, the windows fogged on the inside and the world outside the color of old tin. He wore a clean white shirt under his coat and his cashier's eyeshade tucked into his coat pocket. He was twenty-four years old and he worked the day shift at the Bank Club on North Center Street, behind a brass cage with a marble counter, and he had not been late once in two years.
Morales FamilyHelen Ah Lum walked east on Second Street to the USO on a Friday evening in October 1943, the air sharp with the first cold of the year, the streetlights coming on one by one as she went. She was twenty-eight years old.
Ah Lum FamilyHelen Kellerman stood at the service bar of the Mapes Hotel on the night of December 17, 1947, holding an empty tray and waiting on a tray of old fashioneds. The room was full beyond what she would have believed possible an hour earlier. The orchestra was playing on the small bandstand at the far end. Photographers moved between the tables holding their flashguns up like lamps.
Kellerman FamilyDorothy James stood in the wings of the Sky Room on a Tuesday night in May 1949, listening to the trio finish their warm-up set, looking past the bandstand and out the long window that ran the length of the room. The window faced south, and through it she could see the lit ribbon of Virginia Street, the courthouse and the casino marquees, the dark cut of the river, and beyond that the meadow stretching to the foot of the mountains.
Kellerman FamilyEddie Morales picked up his fourth fare of the morning at the Southern Pacific depot on a Thursday in April 1951, a woman in a navy traveling suit with a leather case at her feet and the practiced patience of someone who had been told to wait at curbside for a cab. He pulled the Plymouth in alongside the loading zone, set the brake, and got out.
Morales FamilyBeverly Cartwright sat on the long oak bench in the second-floor hallway of the Washoe County Courthouse on a Wednesday morning in June 1952, a manila envelope on her lap, watching the brass clock above the courtroom doors. Her hearing was at ten. It was nine forty.
Fitzgerald FamilyGene Voss stood at the foot of the dice table on a Thursday afternoon in October 1950, watching the table from the angle he had been taught to watch it from, which was three feet back from the rail and one foot to the left of the boxman's right shoulder, so that he could see the players' hands, the stickman's hands, and the boxman's hands all at once without seeming to be looking at any of them in particular.
StandaloneTom Fitzgerald stood in the doorway of the attached two-car garage on a Saturday afternoon in May 1958, holding a cardboard box marked KITCHEN POTS in his cousin's handwriting, looking out at the street in front of the house he had bought four weeks ago and to which he had moved in that morning.
Fitzgerald FamilyKarl Schroeder turned the truck off Highway 395 onto South Virginia Street on a Tuesday afternoon in June 1954, drove past the railroad spur and the lumberyard, slowed for the new traffic light at Plumb Lane, and pulled into the gravel apron of the Saddleback Motor Court at the address that was, in another six weeks of paving and signage, going to be its grand opening.
Reinholt FamilyPete Kellerman walked off the long shift at the Southern Pacific roundhouse on the night of February twenty-sixth, 1955, washed up at the locker room sink, pulled on his coat over his work coveralls, and stepped out onto B Street to find the block in front of him lit up brighter than he had ever seen it.
Kellerman FamilyPatrick Fitzgerald stood on the corner of Toano and Fourth Street on the morning of July fourth, 1910, in a clean uniform that had been laundered the day before, with a wooden baton on his belt and a folded square of newsprint in his breast pocket on which his sergeant had written, in pencil, the names of the eight men under his charge and the eight locations along the south fence of the arena where each of them was to stand for the duration of the afternoon.
Fitzgerald FamilyClara Reinholt walked down Virginia Street from her shop on the morning of June twenty-fifth, 1927, in a pale linen suit she had cut and sewn the week before, with her hat in her hand and her gloves folded over the strap of her purse, on her way to the opening day of the Transcontinental Highways Exposition at Idlewild Park.
Reinholt FamilyFrances Cole stood at the front window of her house on California Avenue on the morning of March twenty-third, 1934, holding the second edition of the Reno Evening Gazette in both hands, reading the front-page column for the third time without taking it in.
Standalone (Bluff)Howard Westbrook drove his truck north out of Reno on the afternoon of October ninth, 1948, up the two-lane gravel road that ran past the airport toward Stead, with a folded county-recorder’s plat on the seat beside him and a thermos of coffee his wife Lavinia had filled at noon, and turned off the gravel at the small wooden sign that read SWEATT ADDITION ARROW LEFT.
Hamilton-Westbrook FamilyWalter Hamilton walked up Lake Street on the morning of May twentieth, 1952, in a clean white cook’s coat folded over his arm and a pair of black leather shoes wrapped in a brown paper sack under his elbow, on his way to the kitchen door of the New China Club for the third day of its opening week.
Hamilton-Westbrook FamilyHelen Kellerman rode the elevator to the twelfth floor at a quarter to six with the night’s reservation book under her arm, and when the doors opened on the Sky Room the whole valley was laid out gold and blue in the window glass, the way it was every evening at this hour, and the way she had still not entirely gotten used to.
Kellerman FamilyLavinia Westbrook hauled the last of the week’s water up from the truck at first light on a Saturday in September, two barrels of it, filled the evening before at the station on North Virginia where the owner let them draw from his outside tap, and by the time she had the second barrel braced inside the kitchen door her arms were shaking and the sun was over the Virginia Range and the day was already getting hot.
Hamilton-Westbrook FamilyThe man from the agency came to the Colony on a Thursday in May with a leather folder under his arm and parked his government car at the end of the lane where the Washoe houses were, on the south side, and Lena watched him from her doorway, drying her hands on her apron, while her son Raymond ran past her into the yard the way boys do, not seeing the car at all.
Washoe FamilyRuth Lichtenstein measured the broadcloth against the brass yardstick set into the edge of the counter, snapped the bolt over twice more, and cut it clean with the long shears while Mrs. Pardini watched and approved, the way she had watched and approved at this same counter for thirty years, since she was a young wife and Ruth was a girl doing sums in the back.
Lichtenstein FamilyJack Fitzgerald was standing at the corner of First and Virginia with his hands behind his back, waiting out the last twenty minutes before his relief, when the street under the next block lifted itself up and came apart.
Fitzgerald FamilyRaymond worked the grade north of the railroad tracks all that fall, on the laborer’s crew, walking behind the scrapers with a shovel and a grade stick while the machines tore the long trench that was going to be the freeway out of the middle of the town.
Washoe FamilyDennis Reinholt got the keys to the storefront on South Virginia Street in September and spent six weeks making it into something before he opened the door to anyone.
Reinholt FamilyRay Delgado came in the employee entrance off the alley at two in the afternoon for the swing shift and clocked in and tied on his apron in the locker room, and while he tied it he watched which of the men would meet his eye and which would not.
StandaloneMaria Morales spread the land-use map across the drafting table in the planning office on South Center Street and weighted the corners and began coloring in the block the department wanted cleared, and halfway through she realized it was the block her great-grandfather had settled on a hundred years before.
Morales FamilyHelen Kellerman worked the lobby of the Mapes on a slow Tuesday in March, twenty-seven years after she had first walked in the employee door, and she knew the building now the way you know a house you have lived in your whole life, which rooms held the morning light and which the afternoon, where the floor creaked, where the cold came in.
Kellerman FamilyDennis Reinholt drove south on Virginia Street on a Saturday morning in March with a box of new inventory on the passenger seat and the windows down because the day was warm for the season, and somewhere past the Peppermill the land opened up into that flat valley floor that had been nothing but sagebrush and cattle five years back, and there it was, the thing everyone had been talking about for two years: Meadowood Mall, new and enormous and already drawing cars from every direction like a magnet laid on a table of iron filings.
Reinholt FamilyDaniel Fitzgerald was eating lunch at the station on Island Avenue when the call came in at three minutes past one on a Tuesday afternoon in February, and by the time the engine turned onto Sierra Street he could see the smoke already rising from two blocks away, thick and black, not a house fire, something bigger, something wrong.
Fitzgerald FamilyLavinia Westbrook filled the last of the three jugs at the spigot behind the filling station on North Virginia and set them in the back of the truck next to the empties from yesterday, and she stood there a moment in the morning cold and looked north up the road toward home and thought about what it meant that a woman with a house and a husband and two children and a life in the state of Nevada in the year 1957 still had to drive six miles to fill jugs with water like it was the frontier and not the twentieth century.
Hamilton-Westbrook FamilyEddie Morales was asleep in his room off Wells Avenue when the sirens woke him at seven in the morning on the third of April, and he lay there in the gray light and listened to them build, not one engine but several, and then more, and he knew from the sound that it was downtown and that it was bad.
Morales FamilyBenjamin Lichtenstein walked south on West Street on a Monday morning in June with a box under his arm, and when he reached the lot between Fourth and Fifth Streets he stopped, because the building was gone and the lot was bare and the sky was where the roof had been.
Lichtenstein FamilyEliza Coleman was seventy-three years old and she had been coming to this church since before the walls were up, since the seven founding members met in Sister Carter’s front room on Winters Street in 1907 and prayed on folding chairs and passed the collection plate that was not a plate but a coffee tin with a slit cut in the lid, and she had been coming here since Reverend Solley arrived from the conference to build them a proper house of worship, and she had been coming here since 1910 when the building went up at 220 Bell Street, a modest frame structure with a pitched roof and a cross above the door, and she was coming here tonight, on a Tuesday evening in October 1963, because the NAACP chapter was meeting and because there was business to discuss and because she had not missed a meeting since 1932.
Hamilton-Westbrook FamilyRaymond had not planned to go inside. He had driven past the building a dozen times since the construction fencing came down in the summer, had seen the shape of it from the road, the white concrete shell rising from the hillside at the north end of campus like something that did not belong in Reno or in Nevada or possibly on this planet, and he had thought about it the way he thought about most new things in this town, which was to notice them and keep driving.
Washoe FamilyVictor Morales had been on the ground crew since Thursday, four days before the races started, and by Sunday morning his hands were black with engine grease and his ears rang from the sound of twelve-cylinder Merlins and his back ached from crawling under fuselages, and he was as happy as he had been in his twenty-two years of life.
Morales FamilyDennis Reinholt had been in business six weeks when the dome went up, and from the front window of his record store on Sierra Street he could see the top of it, gold against the December sky, rising above the roofline of the building across the street like a second sun that had gotten stuck halfway to the horizon.
Reinholt FamilyAdelaide Westbrook had not planned to stay in the building past five o’clock, but by the time the light changed in the hallway window from afternoon to evening she was still sitting on the floor of the third-floor office with her back against the wall and her sociology textbook open on her knees and six other students around her, and no one was leaving because leaving was the thing they had agreed not to do.
Hamilton-Westbrook FamilyWalter Hamilton stood across the street and watched them take the building apart.
Hamilton-Westbrook FamilyFrances Cole had outlived the building and the building had outlived its purpose and now she was sitting in the new one, the replacement, which was not new at all anymore but which she still called new because when you were eighty-one years old everything built after 1940 was new and everything before it was the real thing.
Standalone (Frances Cole)They found the bricks on a Wednesday in April, 1975, under a foot of plaster dust and lath in the east wall of the building on Sierra Street that had been the Colonial Apartments until Tuesday, when the demolition permit came through and the crew from Reno Wrecking started on the roof.
StandaloneNevada Stories draws on the archives of the Historic Reno Preservation Society. If these stories matter to you, consider supporting the people who preserve them.
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