In Reno, as in every city, downtown either must change to meet today’s needs or it will abdicate its role as the heart of the city and become a lifeless semi-slum.

Thus begins the August 1969 edition of the Reno Downtown Development Plan.

When the Plan was put together, nobody was quite sure which way downtown Reno was headed. On the one hand, Reno was growing up - literally. Arlington Towers, a 22-story condominium tower that was originally built as a luxury apartment complex, completed construction a couple years prior. It stood across the Truckee River from the 17-story Park River Condominiums, which had been completed a few years prior. The recently opened 17-story Plaza Resort Club stood only a block away. The First National Bank building, now Reno’s city hall, had already stood proudly for half a decade. Harrah’s 24-story West Tower was nearing completion. These towers were the start of modern Reno’s skyline and each one still stands today. 

Interstate 80 was also nearing completion. By 1969, it reached Keystone Avenue, just to the west of downtown Reno, and construction of the remainder of the freeway through the Truckee Meadows would finish within a few years. The route for the US 395 freeway, which would push north-south traffic off of downtown’s Virginia Street, had been chosen and construction would begin soon. Park Lane Mall had opened in 1967, pushing much of the local retail traffic out of downtown Reno and into what was then the more car-friendly edge of town. People were moving out of downtown areas across the country; Reno was no exception. Oh, and there were still trains running through the heart of downtown at least twice a day, blocking traffic and emergency services and making an incredible amount of noise every time they passed through.

Prior to the 1960s, downtown Reno was a place where Northern Nevadans worked and shopped, as well as a place where tourists visited and played. By the end of the 1960s, fewer and fewer Northern Nevadans were interested in driving through downtown’s relatively crowded streets, searching for parking, and occasionally waiting for a transcontinental train to pass. This also extended to many of Northern Nevada’s employers, who were also tired of struggling to compete against local casinos for downtown real estate. The Plan noted that Bell of Nevada (as Nevada Bell was referred to in the Plan) and Sierra Pacific Power Company had both moved out of downtown. The US Postal Service was already planning to move its local headquarters out of the still-iconic Art Deco building downtown into a larger complex closer to the airport; it would finish the move by 1975.

Even so, downtown Reno still had some obvious advantages.

Compactness is downtown Reno’s strongest advantage. It means that tourists can walk from hotel-motel accommodations in all price ranges to all of the places of entertainment. It makes Reno a good place for conventions. Most important, dense downtown development makes Reno “the biggest little city in the world” at a time when more and more visitors live in non-city suburbs and want a vacation from their characterless sprawl. It is unclear whether it will happen, but Reno still has the chance to build a walking-distance financial and office district like San Francisco’s where face to face business meetings usually do not require driving.

Given modern Reno’s largely suburban character, it’s hard to imagine that Reno’s status as a city, biggest or little or otherwise, was dependent upon downtown Reno being an actual functional downtown. The reason for that is that Reno, like many American cities, ultimately prioritized cars over people. This choice didn’t come out of nowhere and certainly didn’t come voluntarily, at least to the urban planners of the era. Reno’s residents, like most Americans, wanted to drive. They wanted to drive to work; they wanted to drive to the store; they wanted to drive home; they behaved accordingly. To accommodate this, downtown Reno had (and still has) several parking garages and street-level parking lots and the Plan recommended turning several of downtown Reno’s streets into one-way thoroughfares. 

Unfortunately, nobody wants to walk near fast-moving steel boxes that weigh at least a ton and nobody wants to walk next to block after interminable block of parking. This is especially true as parking construction, and the attendant parking requirements built into modern municipal codes, is built around peak demand, which leads to many empty spaces and lots. This is doubly true in a resort area with parking built to peak tourist demand. Consequently, the more parking you build, the more parking you have to build since fewer people are walking between destinations and are choosing to drive from block to block instead. 

Reno was starting to learn this lesson the hard way. 

Of course, if you don’t want people to drive and they don’t want to walk, you have to give them another option. 

The automobile is by far the most important mode of transportation in Reno today. Less than 4 percent of internal trips in the metropolitan area are made by other modes. Despite the dominance of automobiles, public transportation is essential to the prosperity of the area. 

Between April 1968 and June 1969 Pioneer Bus Lines, an independent operator, provided service on half hour headways on each of four routes. Bankruptcy terminated service, but there have been several applications for the franchise.

It may seem downright quaint nowadays, but there was a time when private companies provided economical, efficient and effective public transportation, even in Northern Nevada. Pioneer Bus Lines, for example, provided bus service for $0.25 for adults, or $1.76 today. This compares favorably against RTC’s current fare schedule, which currently charges $2 per adult per ride and is heavily subsidized through fuel and sales taxes. 

On the other hand, Pioneer Bus Lines ultimately went bankrupt, just as Reno’s streetcar companies did prior to the Great Depression. The nice thing about private companies operating at a loss, however, is that the people subsidizing the product are the owners of the companies, not the rest of us whenever we buy gas and toiletries. In a way, letting private companies bankrupt themselves trying to provide public transportation is downright progressive. 

Venture capitalists have no problems losing billions of dollars subsidizing our cab fares. Perhaps it’s time to let them subsidize our bus and train fares, too. It certainly would help cut down on the traffic downtown. Just don’t tell them that microtransit, which some of them are already looking into, looks an awful lot like the minibuses described in the Plan over fifty years ago. It’s probably best to let them think they’re being disruptive while they inadvertently give us public transport below cost, all subsidized from foolhardy Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors. 

Speaking of trains…

Among 3,600 responses to a questionnaire mailed to Reno residents with a utility bill in 1966 the most frequently marked answer to the question “What should be done to improve downtown Reno?” was “Solve downtown rail crossing problem.”

Reno was built around trains. More specifically, it was built around the Central Pacific Railroad, which was the western portion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. That set the stage for the Virginia and Truckee Railroad to connect with the First Transcontinental Railroad in the Truckee Meadows, which set the stage for Reno to become an important regional transportation center. However, what was a blessing in the 19th Century proved to be a curse through most of the 20th and wasn’t solved until the early 21st. 

In 1969, the railroad was a source of noise, regular traffic disruptions, and roughly half a dozen accidents a year. Unfortunately, actually solving the problem by moving the trains out of downtown - either by routing them around town like Elko ultimately did or by moving them underground - was expensive. Additionally, even by 1969, there wasn’t much land outside of Reno to move the railroad to. 

Regarding the possibility of building a train trench, the Plan prophetically noted the following:

The years consumed obtaining decisions, preparing plans, and building the subway would divert much downtown energy from the broader improvement program that is needed right away. 

Less prophetically, the Plan estimated building the train trench would cost $15.2 million, or just under $106 million today. That might have been true in 1969, but by the time recently departed Mayor Cashell successfully obtained decisions, prepared plans, and built the train trench, the initial price tag reached $265 million. Unfortunately, by the time it finished, the price spiraled to over $634 million, with the first payments due right at the beginning of the Great Recession. 

Reno will be paying back the debt incurred from that project for decades.

The hotel-casino area from Fourth to Second will have an entirely different character. Wide sidewalks paved with gold colored aggregate will signify that the pedestrian is the most important person and that this is Reno’s most important street.

The gaming area should bear no resemblance to a suburban shopping center. Consequently, the “trees” will be made of shiny metal hoops, set in clusters and outlined at night with small, bright lights. In summer the trees can wear brightly colored canvas caps that will cast shade and could be used to advertise civic events. Already bright, Virginia Street will be even brighter.

Because the proposal is not a mall, it needs its own name to gain recognition without losing its identity as part of Virginia Street. Bonanza Square seems to fit. The “Bonanza” TV show has brought millions of dollars’ worth of publicity to the area, and Reno has yet to capitalize on it. “Square” conveys the idea of inclusion of the entire gaming area.

At some point, the Plan had to prove it was a product of its time. 

“Bonzana Square,” which “should [have] a Wilshire Boulevard aesthetic,” was undoubtedly a fun concept to play with between rounds of Picon Punches, and the illustrator certainly had fun turning the vision into a mustard-colored reality within the Plan. In terms of describing a destination that wouldn’t become instantly dated, however, it was an utter disaster. 

Bonanza, for those of you too young to remember reruns and syndication, was a TV show that was originally produced sometime during the thinly documented prehistory that preceded both my birth and probably yours, and which was rebroadcast to bored elementary school children in the 1980s via the primitive wireless streaming technologies of the time. Many of the episodes were originally filmed in black and white, even though other colors had been invented by the end of the 1930s; given the obsessions over the “Red Menace” of the time, I suspect there may have been a worldwide shortage of primary colors early in the show’s production. 

The basic plot of Bonanza revolved around the activities of the Cartwright family, the ruling monarchs of a large fictional agrarian hereditary monarchy located in the Sierra Nevadas to the east of Lake Tahoe. Each episode addressed challenges that each member of the ruling family experienced during their day-to-day lives in a style not entirely dissimilar to Game of Thrones, albeit with noticeably less nudity and violence. Since the Cartwright family’s large fictional agrarian hereditary monarchy was located near Reno, it was assumed that, just as Game of Thrones has done wonders for Croatia’s tourism industry, the fictional proximity of the Ponderosa Ranch to Reno might do wonders for Reno’s tourist industry as well.

Thinly veiled snark about Hayes Code-era television aside, tying Reno’s image to a television show, even one with the decade-plus production run of Bonanza, would have been a terrible idea. As soon as the show’s run finished or the show was viewed as stale, that image would transitively fall to Reno as well, at which point Reno would have to find some other pop culture ephemera to build its identity around. Thankfully, the plans for “Bonanza Square” never made it past the drawing board and Reno never tried to tie its identity to a television show ever again.

All of that, however, is only obvious with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, Bonanza was a television show that, for many, had been running for as long as they had a television in their home. The cultural shelf life of something like Bonanza was unknown — perhaps it would age like Gone with the Wind, or it would age like Gone with the Wind. Either way, it would surely exert a cultural permanence that downtown Reno would love to transfer and duplicate to itself. 

It, of course, did not. For that we should all be thankful. 

Looking back there were, are, and remain clear limitations to what can be predicted of the future, especially through committee-driven processes. Much of the Plan reflects both those limitations and the choices that were already being made before the planning process even began. Even so, the Plan still demonstrates value as a document detailing the concerns, challenges and ideas of downtown Reno - those that lived there, worked there, and hosted visitors. 

It also gave us illustrations of canvas-covered metal trees. Nothing like putting pen to paper to demonstrate that some plans don’t need to be a reality.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].