Reno Reinvented, From Casino Town to What Comes Next
Near Reno, Nevada
The story of Reno in the late twentieth century is a story of a city that had built its entire identity around something that stopped working. The casino model that sustained Reno through the postwar decades, affordable, accessible, distinctly Nevadan, began to erode in the nineteen eighties. New Jersey voters legalized casino gambling in Atlantic City in nineteen seventy-six. Tribal gaming spread through the nineteen nineties after the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of nineteen eighty-eight. What had once been uniquely available in Nevada became available almost everywhere. Reno's downtown casino corridor emptied. The Mapes Hotel was gone. Harolds Club was gone. The Riverside Hotel was sold and converted to apartments.
The city did not fold. It recalibrated, in ways that were visible only in retrospect.
The University of Nevada grew steadily. Reno's physical proximity to California, four hours from San Francisco, two from Sacramento, attracted businesses fleeing Bay Area costs. Tesla chose Sparks, just east of Reno, for its first Gigafactory in two thousand and fourteen, bringing thousands of manufacturing jobs to a region that had not seen that kind of industrial investment in generations. Apple, Google, and other technology companies established data centers in the area, drawn by cheap land, reliable power, and Nevada's favorable tax structure.
The Midtown district, a stretch of Virginia Street south of downtown that had been functionally abandoned in the casino era, underwent a grassroots transformation beginning in the early two-thousands. Independent restaurants, art studios, bars, and retailers moved in. By the time of its formal infrastructure renovation in two thousand and twenty, Midtown had more than one hundred and fifty locally owned businesses and no national chains.
The city that had once sold legal escape to the rest of the country began selling something different: affordability, space, and proximity to California wilderness. It is still figuring out what to call itself now that the neon that defined it for sixty years is mostly dark. But the Truckee River still runs through the center of it, and the mountains still wall off the horizon in three directions, and the people who live here seem, for the most part, to prefer the current version of the story to the previous one.
