Scott Schrantz's Blog

In case you thought you had to wait until after Thanksgiving to put up Christmas decorations, don't sweat it. You can just follow the example of the Nevada Governor's Mansion, which seems to have taken down the Halloween decorations with the left hand while simultaneously putting up reindeer with the right.

And if you were worried that Thanksgiving had been skipped over entirely, don't be. There is a little tableau out by the street, where the "Gibbons Family" brings you apples and muskets and Technicolor turkeys.

Work on the new structure joining the two wings of the Nevada State Museum has been progressing steadily. They're still working on the steel frame of the new lobby, which will be enclosed in glass and made to look like a mining headframe.

DowntownMakeover.com has two photowalks of downtown Reno today. One shows the construction that is going on around downtown, including the new baseball stadium, and the other is just a stroll around some of the old houses and Fall colors along South Center Street.

I first heard about this plan maybe a week or two ago, but apparently everyone involved thought it was a great idea so it's been fast-tracked. The city is teaming up with the Carson Nugget to bring an ice skating rink to downtown Carson this winter. Downtown Reno has had a skating rink for over a decade now, but for Carson City this will be the first time.

The rink is going to be placed on the Nugget's west parking lot, seen above, which is right on Carson Street across from the Nugget. This is the lot where the Arlington Hotel used to be, until it was torn down in the 1960s. Since then it's just been a parking lot, an empty hole in the middle of downtown. It's also become kind of an impromptu events plaza, with concerts, craft fairs, and other events being held there over the years. And now, the skating rink.

Work on the rink should be starting soon. Opening day is planned to be December 4, and it will operate through the winter until mid February. The cost to install the rink will be about $134,000, with the costs split between the Carson Nugget and the city. They're hoping enough people will come skating at $7 a head to break even, but of course the real reason behind the rink is to try to draw people downtown, and hope that after they're done skating they'll stick around, have a bite to eat, and maybe drop some money in the slots at the Nugget. It's another step towards creating a vibrant downtown, and convincing people to leave their houses in the dead of winter.

More coverage can be found at the Nevada Appeal, RGJ, and News Carson City.

Rich Moreno at Backyard Traveler has a profile of the town of Aurora, the ghost town that even the ghosts have left. Aurora, down near the Hawthorne/Bridgeport area was one of the largest towns in Nevada in its time. It was a mining town that nearly rivaled Virginia City in size, over 10,000 people. It was close enough to the state border that both Nevada and California claimed it, and I think the residents even made a run for State Capital of Nevada. But the town never hit its Big Bonanza like Virginia City did, so it died out quickly. Now little remains of the town except for the cemetery and a few scattered foundations. And the town is nearly unreachable, located miles from any main highway at the end of a 4WD road.

Other links about Aurora:

http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/nv/aurora.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora,_Nevada
http://www.ghosttownexplorers.org/nevada/aurora/aurora.htm
http://www.forgottennevada.org/sites/aurora.html

Big things are happening in Minden. After something like two years of work on the site, they're finally going vertical at the Minden Gateway Center. This week the first walls were raised on the first of what is supposed to be nine or ten buildings in the center. I don't know if they're going to keep working through the winter, but it seems unlikely that they'd stop for two months now that they've started.

I'm trying to figure out exactly which structure this is. It's at the east side of the property, and matching it up with the maps of the site makes it look like this will be the hotel. But doesn't it look too small to be a hotel? Maybe it's the perspective, or maybe because they just started framing. But this doesn't look as big as the hotel is supposed to be. So we'll have to keep an eye on it.

Much more lumber is stacked up on the edges of the site, waiting to be used. I think that we're going to see some real progress at the Gateway Center over the next couple of months.

There were a few post-parade stories in the newspaper today. Two from the Appeal, Parade brings in the crowds and Nevada Day goes political, and one from the RGJ, Parade celebrates Nevada's 144 years. I was at the parade for about an hour before my five-year old got bored and was ready to leave. I'll get up some photos from the parade soon. Until then you can look at RickC's photos on Flickr.

There were two Carson City history articles today. One from Trent Dolan concerns Samuel Post Davis, editor of the Appeal in the late 1800s, and the stories he would write about the fictional Wabuska Mangler newspaper in faraway Wabuska.

The other story from Guy Rocha tries to clear up some of the myths about why Nevada because a state back in 1864. Abraham Lincoln pushed Nevada's statehood through just one week before the presidential election in 1864 not because he needed silver from Nevada's mines to finance the Civil War, but basically because he wanted a few more votes to clinch the election.

The Record Courier has a story about the old Carson Valley Hospital (now an office building across the street from CVMS), and all the ghost stories the owners tell about the building.

It was another successful Halloween on the west side of Carson City. We hit all the same houses and saw all the same decorations, but even though things change little from year to year there is a refreshing familiarity to it all. Some of the houses on the west side really go all out with the decorations, and it makes the whole thing much more fun than just trick or treating in an ordinary neighborhood.

One thing we noticed, though, is that the Governor's Mansion is a lot less exciting now that Jim Gibbons is in office. The governor was there, handing out candy and posing for photographs, just like Kenny Guinn used to do. But the whole atmosphere around the mansion was subdued. There use to be music, and dancing, and elaborate decorations, and a feeling like this was really something special. Now there's just as many people there, but the decorations are lackluster, there's no music so it's quiet, and the place just feels like the life is gone from it. It was like that last year too, Gibbons' first Halloween in the mansion, and this year was even more pronounced. The family and staff just don't put as much into Halloween as the Guinns used to, and the experience suffers for it.

Here's some video of this year's decorations.