Reno taking a gamble on revitalization project
Spirit of innovation, Old West inspiration helping guide city
Midway through his 1940 Western classic “The Ox-Bow Incident,” author Walter Van Tilburg Clark paints the barren Nevada landscape that is the backdrop to a lynch-mob killing.
He writes plaintively of snowy peaks, even in the summer months, of dried creekbeds, meadows bedecked in purple and golden wildflowers, violets “as big as the ball of a man’s thumb,” and timber “to the tops of the hills.” In late summer, “you’d see a sheepherder small out in the middle, with his burro and dogs and flock. . . .”
“It was,” he concludes, “a lovely, chill, pine-smelling valley, as lonely as you could want.”
“Ox-Bow” is set in the waning years of Nevada’s Silver Rush, a decade after gold was discovered in California but during a time when cattle rustling could still lead to vigilante justice. Oddly, though I’d grown up in Northern California, I’d never heard of the book nor much even about the Comstock Lode discovered near Virginia City, just south of Reno, in 1859.
I begrudgingly agreed to read the novel several years ago while living in Europe. Some German friends had eagerly asked me about it, assuming I was familiar with all things American West. Soon enough, not only was I sucked into Clark’s tale of murder, but also his vivid descriptions of a landscape I’d always dismissed as forgettable hinterlands despite never having set foot in Nevada.
When I moved back to California, I found that friends were swooning about the “Reno-ssance” that began around 2011. The city attracted companies such as Apple, Amazon, Panasonic and Tesla to move to Nevada with tax breaks. To satisfy its growing population of younger residents and families (and more retirees from California seeking cheaper living), new art galleries, a revamped river promenade, brasseries, microbreweries and quirky areas such as the Midtown and Riverwalk districts have taken root and replaced some of the seedier landscape for which Reno is typically known.
Last spring, I drove over the still snowy Sierra Nevada range in search of that urban renewal – and to see the rural vistas Clark had described so well.
I figured that it might take some digging to mine modern Reno’s figurative silver. But in this gaming town, I was more than game.
I drove in and arrived at the stylish Whitney Peak Hotel. The city’s first nongaming, nonsmoking hotel, open since 2011, overlooks the prominent “Biggest Little City in the World” sign. After a scone and tea and some people-watching at the cozy Hub Coffee Roasters, I strolled through the Riverwalk District that skirts the Truckee River, which was running wild after a banner year of rain that ended nearby California’s epic five-year drought. Farther on, I passed Bryan Tedrick’s sculpture “Portal of Evolution.” First displayed at the Burning Man festival in 2009, it now seems to be a Reno landmark, and features a butterfly atop droopy blooms – but, by other accounts I heard here and there, it more resembles fallopian tubes.
I frankly preferred a temporary exhibition of wistful Maynard Dixon landscapes at the Nevada Museum of Art, an impressive and imposing four-level structure inspired by Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Another fine exhibition featured modern and contemporary – and political – Mexican art and photography, including pieces by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Yet another detailed the making of Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s “Seven Magic Mountains.” Placed in the desert near Jean, the sculpture is an unmissable landmark of stacked limestone boulders painted in DayGlo hues.
I later wandered to the museum’s Sky Plaza, where from a balcony I had a dreamy view of the snowy Sierras. Afterward, I found myself meandering southward from their base, more or less in search of Dixon’s and Clark’s landscapes.