The Mapes Opens

Helen Kellerman stood at the service bar of the Mapes Hotel on the night of December 17, 1947, holding an empty tray and waiting on a tray of old fashioneds. The room was full beyond what she would have believed possible an hour earlier. The orchestra was playing on the small bandstand at the far end. Photographers moved between the tables holding their flashguns up like lamps. Outside the tall plate glass windows the Truckee River ran black under the bridges, and across the river the older casinos of Virginia Street looked, for once, smaller than they had ever looked, because the building she stood inside of was twelve stories tall and there had been nothing taller in Nevada before.

She was twenty-eight. Her grandfather Otto had opened a saloon on Virginia Street in 1871, before Reno was much more than a railhead and a courthouse. Her father Frank had run that saloon through Prohibition as a soft drink parlor, polishing the brass rail and wiping out coffee mugs and selling whatever could be served openly. Her cousins worked the hardware store her father had taken over after the bank crash in 1932. She had grown up in a family that did not believe in luxury but understood, with a kind of clinical respect, the trade of selling it.

The bartender, a man named Aronowitz who had worked the Riverside before he came over to the Mapes, set the tray down in front of her. Six glasses, three cherries each. He nodded. She took the tray. She moved out into the room.

The opening had been rumored for months and built up in the papers for weeks. The Mapes was, the papers had said, the first major high-rise hotel built anywhere in the country since the war, and it was the tallest building in Nevada. The architect was a man named Slocombe from Oakland. The owner had been Charles Mapes, who had died before construction could begin, and his son had finished what his father had started, breaking ground in January 1946 and pushing the building up through twenty-two months of postwar shortages until it was ready, on this particular Wednesday evening in December, to be filled with a crowd dressed in evening wear and to have its first night.

Helen carried the tray to a table of six near the windows. A man in a tuxedo took two of the glasses and handed one to the woman beside him. Both of them were watching the band.

“Thank you, dear,” the woman said, without looking at her.

Helen smiled and moved on.

She had been hired in October. The training had taken eight weeks. They had drilled her on the layout of the hotel and the menu of the restaurant and the names of the cocktails, on how to address a Mister and a Missus and a Doctor and a senator, on what to do if a glass broke and what to do if a man drank too much and what to do if a fire alarm went off, which was an extraordinarily long set of instructions and which she hoped never to use. Her supervisor was a woman named Mrs. Atherton, who had run the Riverside dining room for ten years and who believed that the difference between a good restaurant and a great one was visible in the angle of a folded napkin.

The crowd was a mixed crowd. There were Reno people in it, the old families, the bankers and the lawyers and the casino men in their best suits. There were arrivals from California, men whose suits had been cut in San Francisco. There were ranchers who had driven in from Carson Valley with their wives, women who had pulled out fur coats they had not worn since before the war. There were divorce visitors, women who had come to town for six weeks and were spending part of one of those weeks at the opening of the new hotel, because what else was there to do on a Wednesday in Reno. And there were people, Helen could tell, who had come up on the bus from Sparks, men who worked the rail yards and who had put on their one good suit because the Mapes was opening and the Mapes was an event.

Her cousin Pete had come up to the bar earlier, before the doors opened to the public. He had stood on the sidewalk outside in his work coat and looked up the side of the building and shaken his head. “Twelve stories,” he had said. “You can see it from the roundhouse yard. Plain as a flagpole. Bobby Decker called me over yesterday and said look at that, Pete, look at that thing across the meadow.” He had laughed. “I don’t know what to think about it.”

“You don’t have to think anything about it,” Helen had said.

“I’m thinking it anyway,” Pete had said.

She moved among the tables. The orchestra finished a number and started another. The flash bulbs went off again and then again. A man at one of the tables raised a glass and his table raised theirs and the gesture rippled outward across the room until half the room was holding glasses up at nothing in particular, simply to be holding them up, to be part of the night.

Mrs. Atherton found her near the window at ten o’clock and told her to take five minutes. Helen carried her empty tray to the back service hall, set it on a side table, and slipped through the kitchen door to the loading dock for some air.

The dock looked east toward the river. Across the water she could see the Riverside Hotel, six stories, dark against the sky. To the north the courthouse. To the south the casino lights of Virginia and Center. The wind came off the Sierra and crossed the river and lifted the hem of her uniform skirt and she pulled her wrap closer around her shoulders.

Behind her the building rose. She did not turn around to look at it. She had been looking at it for ten weeks and she could see it without looking. Twelve stories of brick and steel and concrete. Two hundred rooms. A rooftop dining room called the Sky Room. An indoor pool. An air-conditioning system that would, the papers had reported, be the largest of its kind in the state. The Mapes was, in its design and its scale and its particular ambition, a declaration: that Reno was no longer a town that visitors passed through, but a city that visitors came to. That the lights of Virginia Street were not a curiosity but a destination. That the train of the future would slow and stop here.

Helen did not know whether the declaration was correct. She suspected that the declarations of buildings rarely were, and that the actual function of a building was something the building only revealed slowly, over decades. But she had been born here, and she had grown up watching the saloon her grandfather had opened survive temperance and Prohibition and the bank failures and the long Depression years, and she knew that the buildings that mattered were the ones that adapted, not the ones that announced.

A waiter from the orchestra’s service came out to smoke. He nodded at her. She nodded back. They did not speak. The river ran past the edge of the dock and went on toward the bend at Wingfield Park, and beyond it the meadow, and beyond that Sparks, where Pete and Bobby Decker were probably sitting in some bar at this hour, talking about a building they had seen across the valley.

She finished her break. She went back inside.

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