Whenever I can I visit family in Sparks, Nevada, which is Reno’s
kid sister city. Like other adjoining municipalities in the rapidly
growing West (Salt Lake City-Ogden, Denver-Boulder, Seattle-Tacoma,
Phoenix-Scottsdale), the buffer zones marking city boundaries have
blurred in the last decade. Reno’s city center is prominent thanks
to twenty story casinos (Harrahs, the Silver Legacy, the Eldorado
et al.) and public buildings. I never did find “downtown”
Sparks.
I first saw Reno-Sparks in 1975 during some college-age
wandering. Reno was a compact city of 90,000 surrounded by Washoe
Valley’s cattle and sheep ranches. There were a few small, seedy
downtown casinos such as the Mapes Hotel, Harold’s Club and the
Cal-Neva (the last alone survives, Nevadans having never been
sentimental about historic building preservation). Union Pacific
freights rumbled across Virginia St. (still do), periodically
halting traffic on the brightly lit boulevard. That Reno had a
neon-noir flavor of gamblers and hustling lowlifes looking for the
main chance. Way out east in the valley, Sparks was the municipal
equivalent of “Little House on the Prairie.”
Today, Reno, “The Biggest Little City in the World,” is living
up to its name and becoming a micro-megalopolis and lively modern
outpost of the New West. The population (including adjoining
Sparks) now stands at roughly 200,000 (Carson City — Nevada’s
capital — is forty miles to the south, and adds another 50,000
people). This metropolitan area shares with other cities in the
West the traffic problems that have reduced them to a state of
coagulating gridlock, a pathetic parody of the much despised Los
Angeles freeway system. Interstate 80 and U.S. 395 crisscross Reno,
making for 70 MPH bumper to bumper traffic and its accompanying
daily wrecks, fender benders and road rage.
The city has become an expanding trucking and rail hub with
scores of warehouses lining the Interstate, a busy service economy
of big box stores, and a nascent high tech one as Bay Area firms
escape California’s high taxes, repressive regulations and energy
uncertainty. Tourism and “gaming,” while still big players in the
Reno economy, don’t dominate it now. And unfortunately, the
agricultural sector hardly exists.
From the snow-mantled eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada to the
bleak desert mountains bordering Sparks, the once wide open
paradise of the Truckee Meadows has been carpeted by sprawl. The
subdivisions creep up into the draws and valleys of the surrounding
hills. Reno as seen from the air is a shining aquamarine mosaic of
suburban backyard swimming pools. A bright green golf course in the
hills east of Sparks looks like it was painted on the brown
landscape. These are the paradoxes of life in the arid West, and
they beg the question: Where will the increasingly thirsty West’s
water come from in the future?
The Washoe Indians certainly lived within their water and food
means in their eponymous valley for centuries before it was visited
by a party of mountain men led by Joseph Walker in 1833. The
trappers found the bottoms of the Truckee River a lush oasis in the
desert. These “Truckee Meadows” would eventually attract ranchers
and sheepmen. The pseudo-explorer John C. Fremont, guided by the
legendary scout Kit Carson, led a party (towing a howitzer) through
in 1844. Silver was discovered in the nearby mountains in 1859, and
the resulting mines of the Comstock Lode founded wild and woolly
Virginia City with its gunfights and vigilante justice, its
brothels, and its saloons with names like “The Bucket of Blood”.
Virginia City’s newspaper — the Territorial Enterprise —
was the portal through which the young Mark Twain entered the world
of letters. In an early piece he noted that the first 26 residents
of the new Virginia City cemetery “had been murdered.” The coming
of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1868 marked the beginning of the
end of the region’s wild frontier period.
In the 20th century the Great Depression wreaked havoc on
Nevada’s agricultural and mining economy, and in 1931 the State
Legislature legalized “gaming” as a public revenue source, thus
making possible the neon casino Nevada that we know today: the
Nevada of Bugsy Siegel, Howard Hughes and Frank Sinatra. And Nevada
is the nation’s only state with pockets of legalized
county-regulated prostitution.
The world’s oldest profession is illegal within the city limits
of Reno and Sparks (the same applies for metropolitan Las Vegas).
The “sporting” life in Nevada is not widely advertised. In rural
Nevada, the brothels tend to be out of town, and mostly known about
via word of mouth. Mustang Ranch — now closed — is in the desert
fifty miles east of Reno.
Mustang was once owned by the legendary Joe Conforte, a Nevada
character if there ever was one. Nowadays, Mr. Conforte is said to
be serving prison time for income tax evasion, and the gaudy
interiors of the doublewide trailers of his famous bordello stand
empty, having been repossessed by the U.S. government. Conforte
also lost his sumptuous Reno home to the Feds, and the Reno chapter
of the Hells Angels bought the large walled compound at auction.
Its sinister logo adorns a high wall facing the street, right next
to a newly constructed Evangelical church. I’m sure Mark Twain
noted churches side by side with saloons and brothels in old
Virginia City.
At least some things haven’t changed in New West Reno.
