Remembering the Marvelous Mapes Hotel

Mapes Hotel in 1955

Mapes site in February 2000

   When I arrived in Reno in the early 1980s, one of the most impressive structures in the city was the art-deco-styled Mapes Hotel on South Virginia Street, adjacent to the Truckee River.

   With its logo sign depicting two cowboys (who formed an M) and two-tone white concrete and red-brick exterior topped with neat spires, the 12-story hotel had a certain “coolness” factor.

   The hotel was still open when I came to town. I recall friends telling me it was where the movie stars stayed while filming “The Misfits” in 1961 and it had once been the tallest building in the state.

   I remember riding the elevator to the Sky Room, just to see the view, and just wandering through the place soaking in the smoky ambience.

   Then, about a year after I moved to Reno, it abruptly closed. At the time, I was a reporter at the Reno newspapers and wrote a few stories about the efforts to sell it. I remember even getting a tour of the shuttered hotel on the one-year anniversary of its closing with a bank official and writing a piece about the property’s uncertain future.

   In my story, I compared the old hotel to Blanche DuBois, a character in Tennessee Williams’ classic play, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” who famously had proclaimed, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.” The same was true for the hotel.

   Interestingly, while the hotel had looked a bit old-fashioned with its Art Deco design—at least to the 20-something me—it really wasn’t all that old when it closed. The Mapes had been built in 1947—only about 35 years before it went out of business.

   History books, such as Patty Cafferata’s excellent "The Mapes Hotel and Casino: The History of Reno’s Landmark Hotel," note that the property was the brainchild of wealthy rancher Charles Mapes Sr., who, in 1937, purchased the east corner lot on North Virginia and First streets.

   It was his intention to build a fine hotel on the property to honor his father, George, who, he believed, had once operated a grain store on the site. Unfortunately, Mapes died before he had a chance to build the hotel and the other family members delayed construction with the outbreak of World War II.

   Immediately after the war ended, Charles Mapes Jr., along with his mother, Gladys, and sister, Gloria, moved ahead with the project. The old federal building and post office sitting on the site was demolished and, in January 1946, work began on the brick and concrete structure that would combine an elegant Art Deco design with modern building techniques.

   In planning the hotel, Charles Mapes Jr. specifically decided it would be a dozen stories because that would make it the tallest building in the state—and definitely taller than anything in Las Vegas at the time.

   According to Cafferata, the younger Mapes also reasoned that he could keep that distinction for awhile because no casino would ever build a 13-story tower (13 being an unlucky number) and erecting a 14-story building would be considerably more expensive.

   The Mapes Hotel officially opened on December 17, 1947 with much fanfare. In addition to a full house of locals, the hotel’s guests that night include actor Johnny Weissmuller (star of the "Tarzan" movies) and San Francisco columnist Herb Caen.

   Over the decades, the Mapes served as the host hotel for the cast of "The Misfits," including Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift. It also presented performances by various prominent entertainers of the era, ranging from Mae West to Sammy Davis Jr.

   Additionally, over the years many celebrity guests stayed at the Mapes, including John Wayne, Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra. As Reno's toniest joint, it played host to a number of high profile promotions, film premieres and other special events.

   The party, however, came to an sudden and unexpected end on December 17, 1982. Charles Mapes Jr. had invested heavily in another downtown Reno casino, the Mapes Money Tree, which had failed, and he had been forced into bankruptcy.

   The hotel’s fate remained uncertain for another 18 years as many proposals came and went. Finally, the city of Reno bought the property for $4 million with plans to convert it to a timeshare project.

   When that failed to materialize, the Reno City Council voted in 1999 to demolish the hotel—despite the fact that there were other proposals on the table and the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

   In spite of considerable local opposition, the council moved quickly to implode the building—even though it had no immediate plan for what to do with the site (it has since been used as an urban park and, at times, as a seasonal ice skating rink).

   The structure was destroyed on January 30, 2000. It was the first building on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s List of Eleven Most Endangered Sites to ever be demolished.

Mining Camp Memoir Provides Glimpses of Goldfield's Past

Prospectors buying supplies in a Goldfield mercantile in the early 20th century.

   Every once in a while, you stumble onto a Nevada-related book that you wonder why you had never encountered it before. Sometimes it’s a book that’s been around for a long time, but never quite crossed your path.

   For me, one such book is Frank A. Crampton’s 1956 autobiography, “Deep Enough: A Working Stiff in the Western Mining Camps.”

   For some reason, I was not aware of Crampton or his book, until it was mentioned recently on a ghost town blog and piqued my interest. I found a copy of a more-recent reprint of the book and was pleasantly surprised that it was a fun and informative read.

   While Crampton was born to a socially-prominent family in New York City, he decided to make his way in the world as a hard-rock miner. One of the first places he works was in the Nevada mining town of Goldfield in the early part of the 20th century.

   His descriptions of that mining community’s glory days are descriptive and revealing.

   “Goldfield was the last of the great gold boom camps and had about reached the pinnacle of its productive new wealth when I landed there,” he wrote. “In Goldfield were characters from all parts of the world. The hard-rock miners and other working stiffs were the foundation and hard core.”

   “There were business men from the East and the Pacific Coasting, wanting to take a flyer, but for the most part being taken,” he continued. “There were promoters whose shrewd manipulations made grubstakes for themselves, but milked dry the savings of the credulous who wanted to become wealthy overnight but lost it all.”

   Along the way, Crampton encountered various colorful figures, whose names have become legendary in the Silver State. For example, he knew Shorty Harris, the prospector responsible for the brief boom in a mining camp called Bullfrog.

   “Shorty was looking for another Goldfield. He thought he had found it one-time, and so did a lot of others, and a boom got under way at Bullfrog,” he wrote. “Shorty’s gold outcrop at Bullfrog gave out too soon, and with it his boom camp.”

   Another famous or infamous figure he knew was Walter “Death Valley Scotty” Scott. Crampton wrote somewhat disparagingly about Scott, who was known for “salting” his mining holdings with bits of gold from other mines in order to attract investors.

   During his time in Goldfield, Crampton became a successful assayer and surveyor. He also was a witness to one of the seminal moments in Nevada sporting history, attending the championship fight between Joe Gans and “Battling” Nelson in 1906, which lasted an incredible 42 rounds.

   “No fight that I have seen since has equaled it in any way,” he recalled. “It was a fight from start to finish and not once did either man let up trying to knock the other out. Fight fans got more than their money’s worth.”

   A particularly interesting chapter in the book is devoted to his brief infatuation with an attractive young woman working in one of Goldfield’s “cribs.” After striking up a friendship with the woman, she suddenly disappears from the camp. Several months later, after Crampton had relocated to Oakland, California, to recuperate from illness, he unexpectedly encounters the woman with her husband. It makes for a fascinating read.

   That young woman, in fact, is the reason that Crampton never returned to Goldfield.

   “I didn’t want to return to Goldfield. There was nothing there that urged me to return. My experience with the girl of the crib would bring back memories that I preferred to forget. Goldfield would remind me of her,” he wrote.

   Ultimately, Crampton was presented with another mining business proposition in California, which he decided to pursue. He sold his Goldfield business and moved on to mining camps in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, and other places, before becoming an engineer and prominent political advisor.

   “Deep Enough” by Frank A. Crampton remains in print (from the University of Oklahoma Press) and can be found at most online bookstores.