Hotel Nevada

When it opened in nineteen twenty-nine, the Hotel Nevada in Ely was the tallest building in the state, a six-story tower rising above a copper-boom town in the middle of the Great Basin desert. It was built at the peak of the mining flush, when White Pine County's copper output was helping wire much of the United States. The hotel's ground-floor casino operates to this day. The building still stands on Aultman Street in downtown Ely, a vertical monument to the boom years of the Nevada copper trade.