Tips on Locating Reno
Written: Dec 08 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Setting, Historic City, Dandini Garden
Cons: The Thing from Outer Space
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Reno |
At once, a warning: Reno is not where it claims to be! As a seasoned traveler, you've heard this warning about other tourist cities. In Reno, you will forget it until you are utterly lost.
Approach the city by road or air, and a mound of glittering towers announces what must be the center. Follow a hypnotic repetition of signs, bore to the core of the core, and you see The Sign Itself: "Reno," it famously says on the arch spanning Virginia Street. "The Biggest Little City in the World."
"I'm there!" you think. But you're not.
By night, Reno's main drag slices through the roundish mass of towers like the first cut into a fresh loaf of bread. Virginia Street is a chasm in concrete filled, at first glance, with nothing but furious light. By day, though less of a spectacle, the Sign still makes clear that this is the center of it all. The wide sidewalks bustle with pedestrians, all converging on the various grand entries that welcome you to highest towers in the city.
"Don't go in!" I warn, but you will. I can yell all I want, my voice a muffled squeak from a book buried deep in your luggage. You'll park with breathtaking ease and step through one of these inviting doors. Everyone does.
You know it's a trap. In every detail, the Nevada hotel-casino is designed to be easy to enter and very hard to leave. Once you're inside, the battery of flashing light and sound points you in all directions as you try to pursue some dying shred of intent. The doors where you entered vanish at once. Instead of showing the way back out, their darkly tinted glass simply mirrors the frenzy within.
The towers, whose height and grandeur have drawn you, are impossible to sense from inside. An office skyscraper usually welcomes you with a spacious lobby meant to echo the size of the building. By contrast, you must enter any of Reno’s towers through a casino so dark and low that it might as well be underground. Should you make it to an elevator, against all odds, you'll find that not one of these hotels has an observation deck or even a rooftop restaurant that would let you take in the view. All signs point you in circles, and their flashing lights suggest you should hurry up. You run about, your pulse rising, until you finally collapse in exhaustion onto the nearest stool.
Your breathing slows toward normal. But just as you start to feel like yourself again, you notice that something right next to you - machine or human – is staring at you intently. "Bet?" it asks.
But let's pass over your gambling, much as a writer may pass over the climax of sex. Time stops for a while in an obsessive ecstasy that will seem to have lasted only a second even if you remain glued to your stool for days. As with sex, we'll do the usual row of asterisks, and imagine that somehow, sometime, you emerge again.
******
If you arrived by night and slid into Reno at its most alluring, then by now it is day. As you emerge, a blast of natural light and air scours your senses clean. Colored bulbs still blink, but now their effect is comical; no mortal illumination can compete with the desert noon. The white light of day punctures each flashing bulb to reveal the pathetic wisp of filament inside. These thousands of bulbs, the very same lights that mesmerized you by night, now seem as irrelevant as the mutterings of the damned.
Your car, it seems, has been enjoying a wonderful view, and you pause for a moment to share it. You feel wrong, of course; you know that people don't pause in parking structures. But like the new maid in the luxury suite, you have to stop, hope nobody's watching, and gaze.
The first range of the Sierra Nevada rises in the foreground, its upper slopes a riot of green, or in winter, blistering white. Right at your feet, fresh from these mountains, the clear Truckee River bounces and chatters its way into the east. Your eye rides it for a moment, until you are staring toward the open desert. There, beyond the city, bare hills echo the line of the mountains, receding toward barren plains.
You stand on one of the great natural boundaries of North America, a place that is also an event. East of you is the Great Basin desert, hundreds of miles of rock and sagebrush whose pittance of rain never reaches the sea. But to the west, the Sierra Nevada soars to an abrupt summit just a few miles away, beyond which, you know, is another world, California.
Your mind flashes to the pioneers who came this way. The happiness of seeing water after weeks or months of wandering in the desert. The concern about how to get on from here, through this last wall of mountains barring the way to the promised land. The Donner Party would have paused near here, before fatally deciding to cross the Sierra the face of winter. Reno's history is made of such pauses -- those who stopped to rest and consider before entering the mountains, or those who turned back to settle this watered far edge of the desert, feeling that after so much emptiness, Reno was place enough.
Look down. Just across the river from you is a city: not the aggressive skyline that greeted you at first, but a small, modest, bustling place hugging the far shore of the Truckee. A public walkway follows the riverfront, and behind it rise a few small bank towers, some civic buildings, a pleasant hillside covered with old homes. What city is that, over there?
It's Reno, the Reno where people live, work, dine, party, attend the symphony, go to the bank, yell at the City Council, celebrate birth and love and death, and stroll along the rushing Truckee. Go down there, now. Welcome, at last, to Reno.
As you climb into this city from the river, you notice all the normal urban things that you'd never find in the casinos. Banks where people deposit money, not just machines for withdrawing it. Dry cleaners, sandwich shops, self-service copiers. You wander up into old streets to enjoy the mix of settler architecture, fine homes of brick or stone, graced with street trees lovingly tended for 100 years or more.
On California Street, you find a small pocket of funkiness. The sounds of young chatter draw you up a rickety stairway into a tiny restaurant called Deux Gros Nez. "Two big noses," you translate, smiling. The place is packed with bohemian-looking folks of college age. Normal-nosed young men scribble orders and flip pancakes while wan reincarnations of the young Joni Mitchell chatter about Heidegger's relevance to their current love affairs. Hanging bicycles festoon the ceiling.
When you leave, caffienated and omeletted, you feel newly welcome in this real and bustling city. This living, breathing Reno is fine place, but like Orpheus you must not look back. Don't look at that mound of glittering concrete where you spent uncountable hours and cash. Don't look, I say, but you will. When you do, the towers of the hotel-casinos grab your eye with their sheer disproportionate mass, wrenching your attention away from the real town around you.
From here, the mounded towers look like an alien colony, a Thing from outer space. Its outer skin bears orderly rows of slits, like a hive. Parking structures, of course. Your car is still there. Surely no human planners would design a city where parked cars are offered the prime riverfront view, while humans wander in a 24-hour gloom, blinded by endless flashing lights. This must be the work of some other species, you think.
As you view it now from the south, the Thing looks down on the bleakest urban waste. On both sides of it, east and west, the first few blocks of land are a mix of surface parking, collapsing buildings, patches of desert, and cheap motels advertising Magic Fingers where rooms can likely be had by the hour -- a sensible pricing when you consider how likely they are to burn down.
Perhaps the Thing fell from the sky in its present form, crushing whatever used to be the north half of Reno. If so, then perhaps it was the shockwaves of impact that blasted the land around it in the manner of Mt. St. Helens. Stuff is beginning to sprout again, but it looks like a long haul before anything much will grow within a few blocks of the Thing.
In fact, the only healthy-looking sprouts in the blast zone seem to be expansions of the Thing itself: a lonely Ramada sticks up from the rubble a few blocks to the east. Much further that way, you notice a Hilton, and in the far distance, miles away, yet another tower, the Nugget. You wonder if the Thing spreads like bamboo, shooting out underground runners that randomly punch new towers into the sky.
Beyond the Thing, further to the north, the city seems to resume. Hillsides invite the eye with a mottled complexity made of hundreds of humble, funky bungalows, while another low mass of buildings near them turns out to be the University. Behind these, hills rise further to the north, some covered with sprawl, but most still parkland or open space. Tourists never go up there, so you go.
Driving north, you find a sign announcing Dandini Boulevard. You could never resist the allure of a peculiar name, so you turn and follow it. A good instinct, as always! Dandini winds up the side of the hill to a fine viewpoint, where the community college and the Desert Research Institute perch. Park and climb further, and you encounter the Countess Angela Dandini Garden. (Countess? Indeed, her husband, an assistant to the president at the Institute, retained his nobility as Count Alessandro Dandini even in this most leveling of deserts. Always follow strange names, you think with satisfaction, for they lead to strange places and even stranger stories.)
Even if desert botany bores you, the Dandini Garden feels like the climax of your tour. The air is thin, cold, fresh. You can look down on the Thing and its blast zone, but it's siren song flies away in the steady breeze. You feel untouchable, yourself again. You look again at the real city, just beyond the Thing, where you strolled by the river and where, as you munched your garden omelette in Deux Gros Nez, the couple at a table 6 inches away debated the reasons for Freud's quarrel with Jung.
Now, at last, the Thing and the city seem to fit together -- each on its own turf, but in symbiosis. After all, the Thing did not really land from outer space. The city cultivated it, as a lichen cultivates algae. Reno built the Thing to generate money, but the city has also kept its distance, suspecting a Faustian bargain.
On one side of the Thing, you notice a huge concrete sphere several storeys in height, resting on a ledge. This dome, part of the Silver Legacy Hotel, reminds you of a nuclear power plant. Yes, like a power plant, Reno has to have it, but nobody wants to be close. The horrific goings-on inside give energy to the city. Of course, some part of this energy goes back into the beast. But some of it drives the Desert Research Institute, and the conversation at Deux Gros Nez, and the community college where right now a woman studies chemistry before her long night dealing blackjack, and these well-tended gardens that dream of a life at peace with this enormous land and sky.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 72 members
About Me:
Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
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