Unable to rebuild, Gosse sold the vacant lot for $70,000 to Reno’s most powerful citizen, George Wingfield. Disaster struck in 1922, when a fire destroyed the entire structure. For years, the national media raved about its long-distance telephones, elevator, and stylish patrons. In 1888, four years after Myron Lake’s death, his son-in-law took over the Lake House, renaming it the Riverside Hotel.Ī new era of luxury dawned in 1906, when Harry Gosse of Virginia City, having purchased the old hotel a decade earlier, replaced it with a four-story brick Chateau-style Riverside Hotel-just in time for Reno’s entrance into the divorce trade. Lake quickly constructed a new wood-frame hotel that became one of Reno’s finest. The inn burned down on December 4, 1868, just a few months after the Central Pacific Railroad began selling lots in the new Reno town site, just north of the river. Lake also bought up land along the river in anticipation of the arrival of the transcontinental railroad. In mid-1861, Fuller traded the whole operation for a Honey Lake ranch owned by Myron Lake, who, within five years, turned the river crossing into a lucrative enterprise, complete with a new inn he dubbed the Lake House. He opened a primitive log and dugout “hotel” on the south bank, hoping to capture business from overland travelers and aspiring miners bound for the Comstock. It was vacant land fronting an obscure ford of the Truckee River until late 1859, when a bankrupt California storekeeper and muleskinner named Charles William Fuller built a bridge across the ford, claiming the land on both sides. Widely considered Reno’s birthplace, the site now occupied by the Riverside Hotel has offered some form of lodging for more than 150 years.

Riverside casino theater