The Rise and Fall of the Mapes Hotel
In the few years after the Second World War the US economy began to soar with suburbs first starting up and a new building boom In 1947, Reno became home to the then tallest building in the state, the 12-story Mapes Hotel. The hotel’s prime location on the corner of the Truckee River and Virginia Street had became open for purchase in 1934, when the old post office was replaced by the Art Deco-style building right across the Truckee (today a small shopping district). Funded and named after Charles Mapes, Senior, the descendant of a pioneering Reno family, and his wife Gladys bought the patch of land and hired architect F.H. Slocombe from Oakland, California to develop plans and blue prints for a new luxury hotel. The hotels design was influenced by the Art Deco style of Manhattan’s Empire State and the Chrysler Building. Construction was halted by the passing of Charles, Sr. along with the shortage of building materials that came about with the Second World War. After the war ended, Charles Mapes, Jr. got construction of his late father’s project back on track, The Mapes Hotel officially opened on December 17, 1947. On opening day, the Mapes family announced,
“The hotel is informal in keeping with the western tradition which makes Reno so hospitable. Come in full dress if you want any time…or come in cowboy boots. You will feel equally at home.”
Hotel Description:
With eight floors made up of guest rooms along with a lobby, mezzanine (a low-ceilinged story between two main stories of a building), and service floor. The Mapes Hotel served as an early prototype for the vertical hotel casino design. Its crown jewel was indisputably the 12th floor Sky Room, with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the Truckee River, Virginia Street, and nearby Sierra Nevada and Virginia Mountains. At this time with few Reno hotels having their own nightclubs, the Mapes created their own with dining, dancing, and stage shows along side gambling areas and cocktail lounges found both on the main floor and the top floors.
Entertainment at the Mapes ranged from Liberace to burlesque dancer Lili St. Cyr, with an opening house orchestra and a chorus line called the Skylettes. During the 1960 winter Olympics held at nearby Squaw Valley California, headliners at the Sky Room were Mickey Rooney and Sammy Davis, Jr. The hotel served as the headquarters for the filming of the 1961 film The Misfits, starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, who stayed in a suite on the sixth floor.
Fall of an Icon:
For more than three decades, the Mapes was one of Reno’s most elegant hotel casinos, remembered fondly by many Renoites as the location for many a high school proms and local dinner dates as well as tor it’s world-class performers. Financial woes started by a poorly timed expansion of their Money Tree Casino in 1978 led the Mapes organization to file for bankruptcy a few years later. The building closed it’s doors for good in 1982, changed hands, and was sold to the Reno Redevelopment Agency in 1996. Despite a vigorous campaign by preservationists and Renoites to adaptively reuse the Mapes Hotel, the Reno City Council voted in September 1999 to demolish the building. The historic hotel was imploded the morning of Super Bowl Sunday, January 30, 2000.
Image Credit: Postcard ca. 1960.
