The Mapes Hotel, The Skyscraper That Reno Couldn't Save
Near Reno, Nevada
On Super Bowl Sunday, January thirtieth, two thousand, a twelve-story Art Deco building imploded in downtown Reno with a deep crack and a billow of dust. Thousands of residents gathered to watch. Many of them had been fighting for years to prevent exactly what they were now witnessing. The Mapes Hotel was gone, and with it the building that had been, for one significant decade, the tallest structure in Nevada.
The Mapes opened on December seventeenth, nineteen forty-seven, the first skyscraper built in the American West since the start of World War Two. It was twelve stories of polished stone and Art Deco ornament, owned by the Mapes family, who had conceived of something then genuinely novel: a hotel and casino combined in a single high-rise structure. The concept was the prototype for every Las Vegas mega-resort that came after it.
The building's top floor held the Sky Room, a nightclub stage where the most famous performers of the postwar era appeared. Frank Sinatra played there. Liberace played there. Jimmy Durante and Milton Berle played there. For most of the nineteen fifties and into the sixties, the Mapes was the premier hotel in Reno, its Sky Room the closest thing Nevada's north had to a headline venue.
The casino closed on December seventeenth, nineteen eighty-two, exactly thirty-five years after it opened, a casualty of recession and the Mapes family's financial overextension. The building sat empty for more than a decade while Reno debated its fate. Preservationists argued for renovation. City officials studied cost estimates and found them overwhelming. The Reno Redevelopment Agency took possession in nineteen ninety-six, and after four more years of legal and civic argument, chose demolition.
The building was on the National Register of Historic Places when it came down. It is remembered as one of the most significant historic buildings ever demolished in Nevada, a distinction that weighs differently depending on which side of that January morning's crowd you stood on.
