The Biggest Little City Arch, A Slogan That Stuck

Consider what it takes for a municipal nickname to outlive the people who invented it by nearly a century and still appear on every road sign entering the city. Reno's answer is spelled out in neon above Virginia Street, and it arrived on that arch through a process that was part civic boosterism, part accident, and one winning entry in a public contest.

The first arch went up on October twenty-third, nineteen twenty-six, a steel structure spanning Virginia Street at Commercial Row. Its original purpose was promotional, the city was hosting a Nevada Transcontinental Highway Exposition celebrating the completion of the Lincoln and Victory Highways. The arch cost fifty-five hundred dollars and was intended to come down when the exposition ended. The city council voted to keep it.

Three years later, the arch needed new lettering. The city announced a contest, offering one hundred dollars for the best slogan. A man named G. A. Burns of Sacramento submitted the winning entry: 'Reno, The Biggest Little City in the World.' The words went up on June twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty-nine, lit by illuminated torches on either side of the city name.

There was briefly a backlash. In nineteen thirty-four, some residents pushed to replace the slogan with a simpler green neon sign reading only 'RENO.' The public objection was immediate and the old phrasing returned. The arch has been rebuilt and redesigned several times since, the current version dates to nineteen eighty-seven, but the slogan has never changed again. It has outlasted the casino era that made it famous, the divorce industry that put the city on the national map, and the decades of economic transition that followed. What Burns won one hundred dollars for in nineteen twenty-nine turned out to be one of the more durable pieces of American municipal branding ever written.