The Sahara

The tower went up floor by floor through the spring and Helen Kellerman watched it rise from the lobby of the Mapes Hotel, where she had worked for thirty years, where she knew the name of every bellman and the preferred room of every regular and the sound the elevator made when the cable needed grease, and where none of that knowing was going to matter very much longer.

She was fifty-nine. She had started at the Mapes on opening night, December 17, 1947, when she was twenty-eight and the hotel was the tallest building in Nevada, twelve stories of reinforced concrete and glass on North Virginia Street at the Truckee River, and she had poured drinks in the Sky Room and worked the front desk and managed the lobby and watched three decades of guests walk through the doors, and now she was watching a building across town grow taller than hers, one concrete pour at a time, and she understood what it meant.

The Sahara Reno was going up on Sierra Street, two blocks west, at the corner of Second. Twenty-four stories. Six hundred and four rooms. Del Webb was building it, the same Del Webb who had built Sun City in Arizona and the Sahara in Las Vegas, a company that thought in thousands of rooms and millions of dollars and did not notice a twelve-story hotel the way a freighter did not notice a rowboat. The steel frame was already higher than the Mapes, the crane on top swinging loads of rebar and formwork into the sky, and every time Helen looked out the lobby windows she saw it there, rising, patient, certain of itself.

It was not just the Sahara. Three miles east, out on Second Street where the gravel pits used to be, the MGM Grand had opened in May. Twenty-six stories. A thousand rooms. A casino floor so large that you could fit the Mapes lobby inside it four times and still have room for the bar. Helen had not been inside. She did not need to go inside. She could see the building from the Mapes rooftop, a beige tower against the eastern hills, and the fact of it was enough.

Two new casino hotels in the same year. Two towers, each more than twice the height of the Mapes. And the Mapes, which had been the tallest, the first, the place that announced in 1947 that Reno was a city and not a town, was now the small one, the old one, the one that people drove past on the way to somewhere newer.

Helen stood at the lobby desk and watched a couple come in from the street. They had suitcases and the tired look of people who had been driving, and they came to the desk and the man asked if there was a room and Helen said yes, there was always a room, and she gave them the rate and the man hesitated and said, “Is that the best you can do?” and Helen said yes, and the man took the room, but she could see him thinking, and she knew what he was thinking, because she would have been thinking it too. He was thinking about the tower on Sierra Street that would be open in a month, six hundred rooms, a pool, a showroom, everything new, everything clean, everything the size that things were supposed to be now, which was very large.

She checked them in. She gave them 814, the south-facing room with the view of the river, because even now, even with the MGM to the east and the Sahara going up to the west, the view from the Mapes was still the view from the Mapes, the Truckee cutting through downtown, the willows along the bank, the arch on Virginia Street, the mountains beyond. No tower could take that view. The view belonged to the building and the building belonged to the river and the river had been here before any of them.

She thought about Charles Mapes. She did not call him Mr. Mapes, not in her mind, not anymore. She had called him Mr. Mapes for twenty years and then one day in 1968 he had asked her to call him Charles and she had said yes and continued to call him Mr. Mapes for two more years before the habit broke. He was an old man now, in his seventies, and the hotel was his life’s work, and his life’s work was being diminished not by failure but by scale. The Mapes had not gotten worse. The world had gotten bigger.

He had expanded the Money Tree Casino on the ground floor this year, trying to compete, trying to draw the walk-in traffic from Virginia Street, but Helen could see the math and the math was simple. Six hundred and four rooms plus a thousand and fifteen rooms was sixteen hundred and nineteen new rooms in the market in a single year, and the Mapes had two hundred, and two hundred was not enough anymore. Two hundred had been plenty in 1947 when it was the only tower in town. Two hundred was a rounding error now.

The Sahara would open July first. Helen knew because the construction office on Sierra Street had a sign with the date, and she walked past it every morning on her way in from the parking lot, and every morning the sign was the same, OPENING JULY 1 1978, and every morning the tower was a little taller, a little more finished, the glass going in on the lower floors while the concrete was still being poured on the upper ones, the building assembling itself from the bottom up like a sentence being written.

She had talked to Margaret, the day manager, about what the opening would mean. Margaret was thirty-four and had worked at the Mapes for six years and did not remember the opening night, did not remember the Sky Room when it was new, did not remember when the Mapes was the only tall thing on the skyline. Margaret said the Sahara was a different market. Margaret said people who stayed at the Sahara were not Mapes people. Margaret said there was room for everyone.

Helen did not argue. She had learned a long time ago that arguing with someone who had not yet been disappointed was a waste of the energy she would need when the disappointment came.

At five o’clock she handed the desk to the evening clerk and walked out the front door onto Virginia Street. The afternoon was warm. June. The light was long, the shadows reaching east across the pavement, and Helen stood on the sidewalk and looked north toward the arch and south toward the river and then west, toward Sierra Street, where the Sahara tower stood against the sky, its top floor still open to the air, the crane silhouetted above it, and below the crane the glass, hundreds of panes catching the evening sun and throwing it back in sheets of gold.

She turned and looked at the Mapes behind her. Twelve stories. Concrete and glass and thirty years of her life. The building looked the same as it always had, solid, certain, the kind of building that was built to last. But lasting and mattering were not the same thing, and Helen Kellerman, who had outlasted most of the people she had started with, who had watched bellmen come and go and managers come and go and owners change and menus change and the carpet get replaced three times, understood the difference.

She walked to her car. She did not look at the Sahara again.

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