Saturday, July 05, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Revisiting the Reno casino boom a quarter century later

The 102-room hotel tower at Circus Circus in downtown Reno is seen under construction Sept. 24, 1981. Circus Circus, built on the site of a defunct department store, now has 1,572 rooms. AP Photo

RENO -- Twenty-five years ago, No Vacancy signs burned all along Virginia Street. Construction workers who couldn't find a room on or off Reno's main drag lived in tents along the Truckee River. Housing was scarce and expensive.

In a two-month period, five casinos opened, including one that remains Northern Nevada's largest. Three opened on one gala night that changed the face of Reno forever, all on the same night that Bill Harrah died.

"We had never experienced growth at this level," said Neil Cobb, a 64-year-old Reno native who was a bartender at Sierra Sid's in Sparks in 1978.

"We used to joke that Reno's official bird had become the crane," he said of the construction equipment that dotted the city's skyline. "There was a shortage of any and all building material for private people. It was a building frenzy."

First came the MGM Grand. It opened May 3, 1978, a couple of miles east of downtown Reno with 1,000 rooms and what was then the world's largest casino.

Next came the Comstock on May 26.

The night of openings came July 1 when the Sahara Reno, the Money Tree and Circus Circus, all made their debuts downtown.

"It was very exciting," said LaVerne Walton, who started dealing at Circus Circus nine hours after it opened and is a floor supervisor today.

"I had gone to Sahara's invitational opening the night before, so I hadn't had a lot of sleep. It was wall-to-wall people. There were seven people on every table and every table was open."

In the midst of the revelry as invited guests -- politicians, celebrities, the media and business people milled from one party to the next -- word came that Harrah had died during heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

"We were coming down the escalators at the old (Sahara) at the opening and at the bottom there was a couple of movie stars, and Danny Thomas was there for one of the shows that night and he told us that he had passed away," then-Mayor Bruno Menicucci said.

Harrah, who parlayed a 1937 bingo parlor into downtown Reno's first major casino, was known for his meticulous hands-on approach to running his casino. If a light was burned out or a carpet smudged, he saw it and it was taken care of.

He popularized use of the word "gaming" to help sanitize the stigma of "gambling."

"I think he was a tribute to the gaming operation, the gaming industry, particularly in this state," Menicucci told Reno's KOLO-TV in an earlier interview.

As mayor during the casino boom, Menicucci hailed the expansion of the city's core business and the area's dynamic growth. Reno's population increased 28 percent in the 1970s; Washoe County's, 38 percent.

But with the growth came growing pains: inadequate and overpriced housing, a sewage plant that lacked the capacity to handle already approved projects and the inevitable shortage of water.

Within three years, Menicucci was replaced as mayor by Barbara Bennett, who advocated controlled growth. Pete Sferrazza was elected to City Council on the same platform.

Of the five casinos that opened a quarter of a century ago, the MGM is now the 2,001-room Reno Hilton, Northern Nevada's largest hotel.

Circus Circus, which was developed on the site of a defunct department store with 102 rooms, now boasts 1,572.

The Sahara, after a series of ownership changes and a dark spell, is now the 604-room Golden Phoenix.

The Comstock still is a hotel, but its casino has been converted into an antiques mall. The Money Tree folded in 1982 when owner Charles Mapes went bankrupt.

"Clearly, in retrospect, there was an overestimation of the amount of profit that Reno could bring," said Phil Satre, a Reno resident and chairman of Las Vegas-based Harrah's Entertainment.

"The Money Tree had a hard time and the Sahara started to struggle almost immediately. The pie wasn't big enough for all the new supply," he told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

But even as some casinos struggled and others gave up, the area continued to grow, more than doubling over the past quarter century.

"And look at us," Menicucci said. "We're still arguing about the same things that we were arguing about 25 years ago."