Her grandniece drove her down and parked on the far side of Virginia Street, across from the river, and said she would wait with the heater on, take your time, Aunt Helen, there is no hurry, though of course there was, there was the largest hurry there had ever been, because in the morning the building would not be there.
Helen Kellerman got out of the car by herself. She was eighty-one and she did most things slower now but she still did them herself, and she stood a moment on the cold sidewalk with her hand on the roof of the car and looked across at the Mapes.
They had it fenced. Chain-link ran all the way around the base of it, and there were signs on the fence, and the ground floor windows were boarded, and up the height of the tower she could see, here and there, where they had gone in and done their work, the dark holes in the concrete where the men had set the charges. Twelve stories against the January sky, no lights in it, the neon gone off the roof years ago. It had been empty seventeen years. It had closed on the seventeenth of December, 1982, thirty-five years to the day after it opened, and Helen had not been working there at the end, she had left in the last bad year when there was nothing left to manage, but she had been there at the start, at the very start, on opening night in 1947 when she was twenty-eight and it was the tallest building in the whole state, and she had poured drinks in the Sky Room on the twelfth floor with the whole valley laid out below her in the dark.
A security man came along the inside of the fence with a flashlight. He was young, thirty maybe, in a padded coat with a radio on his shoulder, and he stopped on the other side of the chain-link and looked at the old woman standing there alone in the cold at nine o’clock at night, and he said, “Ma’am, you can’t be down here. It’s all sealed. They set it off in the morning.”
“I know they do,” Helen said. “I worked here. I worked here thirty years.”
The young man looked at her. She was used to that look, the one people gave you when they were deciding how much of what you said was true and how much was an old woman’s story. But something in this one gave way. Maybe he had a grandmother. Maybe he was just cold and bored and it was the night before he helped take down a landmark and it did something to a person, that kind of night.
“I can’t let you up,” he said. “The upper floors are done. It’s not safe, there’s charges set the whole way up, I’d lose my job and worse. But.” He looked back over his shoulder at the boarded lobby. “The lobby’s clear. They haven’t touched the lobby, it comes down with the rest but they didn’t need to wire it. I could let you stand in the lobby a couple minutes. That’s all. Two minutes.”
He unlocked a gate in the fence and walked her across the dead apron and got a door open, and Helen stepped into the lobby of the Mapes Hotel one last time.
It was cold and it was empty and it smelled of dust and the river and something chemical underneath. The chandeliers were gone. The front desk was gone, the desk where she had run a thousand bills, where she had stood the day a tired woman in a gray dress had asked her whether this was a beautiful place and Helen had not had an answer. The elevators were still there, the brass doors, the arrows over them dark. The marble was still on the floor, scuffed and gray, and it was strange to stand on it in the dark with a stranger’s flashlight for the only light, this room that had been the brightest room in Reno, where the divorcees came down in their furs and the entertainers came in the side way and the whole town came on New Year’s, all of it gone quiet, gone to a cold box waiting for morning.
She did not need to go up. That was what she understood, standing there. She had thought she wanted to go up, to the Sky Room, to the high window one more time, but she did not, because she carried the Sky Room in her and always would, the view from the twelfth floor that showed you the whole geography at once, the river and the arch and the university on its hill and the new houses spreading west and the lights of Sparks off east by the railyard, the town becoming a region while she watched it out a window and poured drinks and got older. She did not need the window. She had the window. What she had needed was to stand once more on this floor, in this room, in the body of the thing, before it was rubble, and she was doing that now, and it was enough, and it was almost too much.
“They tried to save it,” the young man said quietly, behind her. “I read about it. There was a whole fight. Some national outfit put it on a list, the endangered list, and people wrote letters, and the city looked at bringing somebody in to make apartments out of it, like they did the old Riverside. But the numbers didn’t work, or somebody said they didn’t, and the council voted, and here we are.”
“I know,” Helen said. “I read it too.”
“You think they should’ve saved it?”
Helen looked at the dark brass of the elevator doors. She thought about the question the way she had learned to think about hard questions, slowly, without hurrying to the comfortable side of it.
“I think,” she said, “that a building is not the thing people think it is. People think the building is the memory. It is not. I am the memory. The building was only where it happened.” She turned and looked at the young man in the dark. “They can knock down where it happened. They cannot knock down that it happened. So no. I did not need them to save it. I would have liked it. That is a different thing than needing it.”
“Two minutes is up, ma’am,” he said, gently, because he had to.
“I know it is.” She took one more look, the whole cold empty length of the lobby, and she fixed it, and then she turned and let him walk her out through the gate and lock it behind her, and she crossed back over Virginia Street to the car where her grandniece sat waiting with the heater running.
“Do you want to come down in the morning?” the girl asked, when Helen had gotten in and closed the door. “To watch it. A lot of people are going to come watch.”
“No,” Helen said. She put her cold hands in front of the vent. “No, I have seen it. I saw it tonight. I do not need to see it fall. Take me home now, and in the morning you sleep in, and do not tell me about it.” She looked once more through the window at the dark tower, and then she looked away from it, forward, through the windshield, up the street. “Go on. It is late. I have kept you long enough.”
The Mapes Hotel, which opened December 17, 1947, as the tallest building in Nevada and the first postwar high-rise casino in the western United States, closed December 17, 1982, and stood vacant for seventeen years. It was placed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in 1998. After the Reno Redevelopment Agency, which had taken ownership in 1996, was unable to make an adaptive-reuse plan work, the Reno City Council voted in September 1999 to demolish it. The building was imploded on the morning of Sunday, January 30, 2000, before a large crowd; the site later became a downtown public plaza. Jeff Griffin was the mayor of Reno at the time, serving from 1995 to 2002. The former Riverside Hotel, referenced here, was converted to artist lofts and opened in 2000.