The Divorce Capital, Six Weeks in the Biggest Little City

The Riverside Hotel sits on the north bank of the Truckee River, a block from the Washoe County courthouse. In the nineteen thirties, forties, and fifties, that proximity was not coincidental. Guests staying at the Riverside were usually there for one reason: they were waiting out the clock on a Nevada divorce.

Nevada had been loosening its divorce laws for decades before the famous nineteen thirty-one legislation. By the early twentieth century, the state already drew divorce-seekers from around the country because its residency requirement was short and its grounds for divorce were more generous than most states allowed. Then the Depression arrived, and the Nevada legislature made its boldest move. In March nineteen thirty-one, the same session that legalized casino gambling, lawmakers dropped the residency requirement to six weeks. You arrived on a Monday, established legal residence in Nevada, and if you waited out forty-two days without returning home, you were free to file.

Other states objected loudly. Legal challenges went to the Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld Nevada's law. The effect was immediate. Thousands of Americans who could not or would not endure the lengthy, fault-based divorce proceedings required in their home states, where adultery or cruelty had to be proved, and where social scandal was almost unavoidable, boarded trains for Reno.

The Riverside Hotel was erected in nineteen twenty-seven by Reno powerbroker George Wingfield, built with wealthy divorce-seekers in mind. It featured forty corner suites with kitchens, refrigerators, and connecting rooms for children and servants. It sat next door to the courthouse. The hotel gained an international reputation, appearing in novels, films, and newspaper dispatches from reporters who came to write about what they called the Reno cure.

For those with money and a taste for discretion, there were also the divorce ranches. The most exclusive was the Flying M E, twenty miles south in Washoe Valley. Guests arrived like tourists at a dude ranch, riding horses, square dancing, entertaining fellow sufferers, while quietly establishing residency. The clientele included names like Astor and Du Pont, and movie stars Ava Gardner and Clark Gable. Arthur Miller came to Pyramid Lake's shore to establish his Nevada residency before marrying Marilyn Monroe.

The era faded when other states finally updated their laws. By the nineteen seventies, no-fault divorce was spreading across the country, and Reno's six-week industry had lost its competitive advantage. What remained was the infrastructure of a city that had remade itself once around a legal loophole and would have to figure out how to do so again.