Tag: ormsbyhouse

Dave Frank at the Nevada Appeal has a story today about the history of the Ormsby House logo, the rose-in-gun symbol that's hung off the building from the day it opened. The logo was meant to represent the "mild Wild West" theme of the hotel back in 1972, when it was opened by former governor Paul Laxalt. The logo was then put on everything, the hotel itself, matchbooks, ashtrays, Keno tickets, brochures and postcards. And now it's being put back on the property, both on the long-suffering Ormsby-Winchester Club and on the main sign. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more of it as time goes on.

It's been over a year, but there's a new update to the Ormsby House Renovation Gallery. This time it's covering the fact that they installed a new sign on the property.

The Ormsby House is definitely becoming Carson City's shared community joke. This time it's a letter to the editor decrying its fate:

My wife and I absolutely love living in the Carson City/Carson Valley paradise. For some reason, however, the Ormsby House remains an "unsolved mystery." We simply cannot comprehend a bunch of "whys" ... i.e. why do the owners Al Fiegehen and Don Lehr either develop the property or dump it. It seems to me that, if you purchase a business, you want to get it open in order to derive a profit from it. Why does Carson City allow that huge piece of property to simply "sit" year after year while "life goes on" in other areas of Carson City (i.e. a beautiful Marriott Courtyard adjacent to the Fandango? It took basically a year to construct the Marriott while the Ormsby House continues to basically rot across from our legislature buildings. There must be a reason why such a huge piece of prime property and such a visible tomb that was once the Ormsby House is just sitting there gathering dust! I have a feeling that there is indeed several subplots that underlie the Ormsby situation and only a handful of politicians have the answers. It is long past time for the truth to be "outed" regarding the Ormsby joke. I can assure you its present owners, Al Fiegehen and Don Lehr, don't run their Reno-based business, Cubix Computer Corporation in the same manner as their "investment" of the Ormsby House.

GARY BROWN
Minden

I don't think the "politicians have the answers". They probably want it open just as much as everyone else, because an empty building generates no tax revenue. Also, Carson City is not "allowing" it to sit empty. There isn't jack they can do to light a fire under the owners. Especially since the city has given all their money away giving incentives to the people renovating the old Wal*Mart building. They have nothing left to give.

The Ormsby House is kind of starting to remind me of the Denny Hotel in Seattle. The Denny Hotel was a grand Victorian structure built right at the tip of one of Seattle's many hills in the late 1800s. It was hit by extremely bad luck, though; as soon as the hotel was finished in 1893 Seattle went into a deep financial crisis. So the hotel never even opened its doors. For the next ten years the doors remained locked, with a single caretaker living on the premises. It wasn't until 1903 that a new owner got it together enough to reopen the hotel. President Teddy Roosevelt was the first guest to stay there.

So will the Ormsby House turn out to be Carson City's equivalent of the Denny Hotel? Right now we're at seven and a half years since it closed, and there is no opening date in sight. I'd say we could hit ten years, easy, and probably more. The only question would be if we could get the President to stay in the Ormsby House as its first guest. That might be a long shot.

And whenever it does open, we better hope the Ormsby ultimately has better luck than the Denny. In the early 1900s, Seattle was in the grips of regrade fever, leveling many of their hills to create flat land for new construction. The hill that the Denny Hotel sat on, which coincidently was called Denny Hill, was one of those on the regrade list. So in 1906, just three short years after it finally opened, the Denny Hotel was torn down.

This photo was submitted to the Around Carson Photos section, but it was so good that I had to add it to the WNHPC. I'm also including the caption I wrote for it.

This fantastic view looks southwest from the dome of the Capitol Building in the winter of 1916. A layer of snow several inches thick lies on the ground and covers the streets, in the days before snowplows. The sidewalks have been shoveled, though.

There are lots of great details you can pick out of this photo, but probably the two hotels in the center can be called the star attractions. The dark hotel to the left is the St. Charles Hotel at the corner of Third and Carson streets, or at least that's what we know it as today. At the time of this photo, in 1916, I believe it was called the Golden West Hotel. The two sections were built as separate establishments; the three-story section to the north was commenced in April 1862, and was known as the St. Charles. The two-story building next door was started one month later, and was called Muller's Hotel. The two consolidated in 1894 as the Briggs House, then went through several more name changes over the 20th century.

The large light-colored building just right of center is of course the famous Ormsby House, but it went through a name change as well. Here in this photo it is called the Park Hotel, as you can see by the banner at the corner. It was built in 1860 at the corner of Second and Carson streets by Major William Ormsby, who was killed just months after its completion. At the time it was just a single story building at the corner; it was subsequently added to until it grew into what you see in the photo here. In the 1940s it had fallen into bad repair, and was demolished. The dark two-story building next to it survives to this day, though.

At the lower left corner is a block of buildings on Second Street. The single-story stone building on the corner was home to the Daily Appeal. The newspaper published from there for over 80 years before moving to larger quarters in 1948. All of those buildings were later razed to extend the Capitol Plaza south to the new State Legislature Building.

Many other little details can be seen in this photo. At the left edge, next to the St. Charles, is the false-fronted building that today houses Comma Coffee. At the lower right corner is a building along Carson Street that was torn down to build the Heroes Memorial Building. And in the background, residential Carson City sprawls out all the way back to the base of C Hill. At this point the town had been around for nearly 60 years, plenty of time for all those large trees to grow. A more in-depth study of the photo would certainly reveal many houses that are still around today, and just as many that have been torn down for new development.

You know, just reporting on this news from last weekend makes me tired. Just reading it makes me sleepy. But I can't ignore it forever, so I've got to put it up here.

Ormsby House owners announce 2009 as new opening date.

I don't believe it, not for a minute, but that goes without saying. I was wondering when the Nevada Appeal was going to do another story on the Ormsby House. It seems like it's been over a year. They used to run a story like this every six months, with a new opening date announced each time. So even the paper is losing interest in being strung along, apparently.

Oh well, Hire these guys to do the job, and wake me up when it's open.

It's been months and months, but I've finally published another update to the Ormsby House Renovation Gallery.

This update is so far reaching I couldn't even assign it to just one month. So I called it the Winter 2006 Update because there are pictures in there from November, December and January. And yet it's still only one page, because there really wasn't a lot of exciting stuff going on. The new sidewalk got laid down, and the pool's sunroom was built on the roof.

Go check it out.

New Then And Now:
#28 - The New Ormsby House

While I was sifting through the slides at work I cames across a bunch of promo materials that Carson City Tourism put out in the early 1980s to get people to come to the area. These shots promoting the Ormsby House were just too good. I had to share.

The old front entrance, with the original portecochere. The tower itself looks like the Projects. Barely ten years old, and already it was in rough shape.

Pat and Vanna on the Grand Staircase.

There's something very uncomfortable and wrong about this picture.

"Want to order room service?"
"And then we can read Omni magazine!"

That carpet was buried in the New Mexico desert under eight feet of concrete.

He's only interested in the articles.

I sincerely hope that when the Ormsby House reopens, the rooms will be more tastefully appointed than this. Because there's a place for a chicken-basket-flower-pot, but not in a hotel with any number of stars.

Ormsby House Special Report: Inside the Ormsby House

I can’t believe it took me this long to get this published. On October 20, 2006, I was invited to take a tour of the Ormsby House. I went from the top of the roof to the bottom of the basement, and everywhere in between.

The Grand Staircase

After plenty of procrastination, I’ve finally published the photos from that tour. These pages take you through to see how much progress has been made on the inside. I don’t want to spoil the end, but there’s not a lot done. There was a lot of demolition, to be sure, and the building is largely gutted. But they haven’t done a lot of construction to put it back together, except on the hotel floors. And even there, there’s still a lot left to do.

Anyway, go take the tour for yourself. There are five pages this time
One — Two — Three — Four — Five