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1 Of Sin and Salvation The Architect and the Gardener That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind; quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and with all that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom. —Frederick Jackson Turner, on the American character, 18931 No one told Gary K. Estes that the Wild West left Reno a long time ago. Estes had just taken on a project in a downtown casino, the Comstock, on the block of West Street just north of the Truckee River. Actually, the sixteen-story building wasn’t a casino anymore. The saloon-style doors on the slanted entrance at the corner of Second Street were boarded shut, and the wall of hotel rooms had since become a rent-by-the-week, singleroom occupancy for the down-and-out. Estes was an architect. Earlier in his career, he had worked as a draftsman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but he now operated a designbuild firm in downtown Sparks and specialized in commercial projects for the burgeoning city, such as the new 7-11at the corner of Pyramid and Victorian. Occasionally he worked in Las Vegas, but he preferred the crisp mountain air of Reno to the Mojave swelter. He combed his hair straight back, kept a silver mustache, and draped a leather jacket over his bony frame. He wore a pair of snakeskin boots that he ordered online, only to find that the man selling them lived down the street. In 2004, the Comstock was for sale. Estes knew the building: The Comstock had been built in the late 1970s as part of that decade’s 2 Chapter 1 downtown high-rise casino-hotel building boom, and its 310 rooms became popular with Canadian tourists. Estes visited to eat the casino’s quality one-pound steaks. Then, when it became weekly rentals, he designed a commercial laundry for it. The casino was a tired mockery of the Old West, with scenes painted on the walls and dummies welcoming patrons on the ground floor. Its façades were a canvas for nightly display of blinking lights, which helped make the Reno skyline a colorful chaos each evening. But the Comstock closed in the 1990s, having become a victim of long-term changes in Reno’s economy. Las Vegas had long since taken the Nevada gaming capital title, Indian casinos took what remained of the national gaming business, and many of the successful local casinos in the Reno area sprouted at the city’s edges and in the suburbs. The city, which had been increasingly trying to keep up with Las Vegas’ tourism attractions in the second half of the twentieth century, hoped to reenergize its downtown by pushing through the opening of the Silver Legacy in 1995, which became the city’s tallest building. The project took up two city blocks, one for the hotel tower, the other for a giant dome that encased a 120-foot-high mining rig. Reno officials and Silver Legacy developers openly sought to make the project a Las Vegas–style themed project, like New York–New York and the Venetian but with the Old West as its theme, complete with a background story of a young man heading out west to find his fortune in silver.2 The Comstock, meanwhile, having been converted into weekly rentals , became the real Wild West: not a place of romance and the country but of urban squalor. The parking garage turned into a scary trap. Rooms went for $99 a week. Cops went in and out all the time and fire alarms sounded through the night. “I saw more uniformed police officers in my first week here than I have in my entire life,” said one former tenant whose stay at the Comstock was short.3 In fact, the Comstock fit in more with what downtown Reno had been for a long time: a sanctuary for transients or refugees from the laws of stricter jurisdictions. Downtown Reno was packed with weekly rental motels and hotels, labeled by the Reno Area Alliance for the Homeless not as affordable housing but, like the other weekly rentals, “emergency transitional family housing,” a term that seemed to give the whole district an air of triage. “It was old and sad and dark. It was all...

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