Under the Arch: Virginia Street and the Making of Reno
'The Biggest Little City in the World' has glowed over Virginia Street since 1926 — and the street beneath it has been a railroad crossing, a divorce capital and a casino row. The arch, the slogan and the street, explained.
The Reno Arch is the rare civic symbol that tells the truth twice. The current arch — the third to carry the slogan since 1926, its letters now lit by thousands of LEDs — spans Virginia Street downtown with the promise the city made itself a century ago: 'Reno, The Biggest Little City in the World.' Beneath it runs the street that made Reno: the crossing of the Truckee River where the town began.
Reno was platted in 1868 by the Central Pacific Railroad, which auctioned the lots of a station town on the Truckee's south bank and named it for a Union general, Jesse Lee Reno. Virginia Street ran from the depot to the river bridge and out toward Virginia City — the Comstock's silver built the street's first fortune, and the railroad sustained it. The twentieth century added the industries Reno became famous for: the divorce trade, legalized by Nevada's short residency laws, which filled the hotels and dude ranches for decades; and gaming, legalized in 1931, which built the casino row under the arch and made Virginia Street a neon canyon known around the world.
The street's later chapters are the city's: the railroad tracks that once ran down its center were lowered into a trench in the 2000s, reuniting downtown; the casino economy consolidated into fewer, larger properties while others closed and converted; new districts — the Riverwalk along the Truckee, Midtown to the south — grew up as the street's new answers to the question every era asks Virginia Street: what is Reno for, now?
The arch itself is city property and civic ritual: its bulbs and now its LEDs have been changed by mayors and adopted by service clubs; its likeness marks everything the city sells about itself. To stand under it in November, with the river running cold a block away and the crest white above the rooftops, is to stand in the exact spot where the city's arguments about itself have always happened.
Our history desk will work Virginia Street regularly, because Reno's future keeps being decided on its oldest ground. The slogan promised a small city with a large life. A century on, the city is still negotiating the terms.
