Tying and Untying the Knot
For more than sixty years, Reno was the divorce capital of the world. It was the place where you took “the cure,” got “Reno-vated,” and threw your wedding ring into the Truckee River from the Bridge of Sighs. Prior to 1970, divorce statutes in most states were so strict that some people seeking divorces traveled to places with more lenient laws. The business of attracting divorce-seekers was called the migratory divorce trade.
A high-profile divorce case in 1906 paved the way for Reno to become the divorce destination. The Reno divorce experience was popularized in film and fiction, and everyone in America knew what it meant when someone said, “I’m going to Reno.”
By the 1960s, Las Vegas had surpassed Reno in number of divorces, but by then it didn’t matter. No-fault divorce became the national norm by the 1970s and the migratory divorce trade came to an end.
Reno’s quick wedding trade developed as the result of Nevada’s lenient marriage laws. It got a boost in 1927, when the California legislature passed a law requiring a three-day waiting period. Though Reno remained famous for divorces, it wasn’t long before the Washoe County Courthouse turned out more marriage licenses than it did divorce decrees.
Washoe County Courthouse
The center of Washoe County government since 1873
This courthouse was the third for Washoe County, which was established in 1861 as one of Nevada territory’s original nine counties. In 1871, Myron C. Lake donated an acre of his land for Reno’s first courthouse, as the ambitious young town wrested the county seat from Washoe City, some 20 miles to…
View Story Show on Map
Riverside Hotel
The grand 1927 hotel took center stage during Reno's reign as the Divorce Capital of the World.
Widely considered Reno’s birthplace, the site now occupied by the Riverside Hotel has offered some form of lodging for more than 150 years. 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…
View Story Show on Map
Virginia Street Bridge (site)
The bridge constructed across the Truckee River in 1905 became a nationally known landmark in Reno's divorce era.
A bridge has graced this site since 1860, when Charles William Fuller constructed the first recorded span of the Truckee River at what was then known as “Fuller’s Crossing.” In 1861, he sold the whole operation to Myron C. Lake, who had to replace the bridge after a damaging flood that winter. Lake…
View Story Show on Map
Thomas' Café (site)
A favorite of the divorce colony, the elegant eatery was called "The Delmonico's of Reno."
Reno in the first decade of the twentieth century was a rapidly modernizing little city with an increasingly cosmopolitan flair. The arrival of well-heeled visitors, many in town from the East Coast to secure a six-month Nevada divorce, prompted the opening of a flurry of new apartment buildings,…
View Story Show on Map
Colonial Apartments
The Colonial Revival-style charmer offered 48 furnished units on West Street in 1907.
The Colonial Apartments, located at the corner of W. First and West Streets, was built in 1907 by partners Charles E. Clough and George Crosby. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the temporary housing needs of Reno's divorce colony prompted the construction of several modern…
View Story Show on Map
Nystrom Guest House (moved)
The 1875 Gothic-style residence was a rooming house for a century.
The stately Gothic-style house that originally stood at 333 Ralston Street would be historic enough as the home Washoe County Clerk John Shoemaker built in 1875. However, the Nystrom Guest House also played an important role in Reno’s twentieth-century migratory divorce trade, which gave the town…
View Story Show on Map
Nortonia Boarding House
The lovely turn-of-the-century Queen Anne house was popular among Reno's divorce-seekers.
The Nortonia Boarding House was built as a single family residence around 1900. It is an excellent example of the Queen Anne style of architecture popular at the end of the nineteenth century. The circular two-story porch with balustrade is an unusual architectural feature for a Reno Queen Anne,…
View Story Show on Map
Miller-Rowe/Holgate House
Built in 1903, the Queen Anne home offered rooms for rent in Reno's divorce heyday and beyond.
The Miller-Rowe/Holgate House represents Reno’s changing trends in housing during the first half of the twentieth century. The Queen Anne-style house was built in 1903, as a single family residence that Jeanette Miller, the first owner, used as a rental property. The mining booms in Tonopah and…
View Story Show on Map
California Apartments
The Vacchinas hired Frederic DeLongchamps to design this Classical Revival building in 1921.
In 1921, Reno's so-called "Divorce Colony" was thriving, and building in general was booming. In addition to a growing permanent population, Reno needed housing for its temporary residents, the divorce-seekers. On March 29 of that year, the local paper announced that at least three…
View Story Show on Map
Tyson House
Born in Ireland, Ellen McNamara ran her comfortable rooming house on Liberty Street for two decades.
This stately Queen Anne-style building and a small carriage house behind it were built around 1905. Though it was probably built as a single family residence, from as early as 1907 the carriage house served as a rental cottage. By 1921, the house itself had been divided into flats and was…
View Story Show on Map
Rick's Resort (site)
Opened around 1909, the glamorous resort on Mayberry Drive was later named The Willows.
Rick's Resort was opened around 1909 by Rick DeBernardi, the son of Swiss immigrants, several miles west of Reno on what was then called the Old Verdi Road. In the summer of 1910, the resort shot to fame as the training quarters for prizefighter Jack Johnson, who defended his heavyweight…
View Story Show on Map
Chism's Auto Camp
An appealing stop for travelers to and through Reno since 1927
Located on an alternate route of the Lincoln Highway on the west side of Reno, the auto camp was a successful business for the Chism family beginning in 1927.
View Story Show on Map
Silver State Lodge (site)
A charming rustic retreat on U.S. 40
The year 1931 was a pivotal one for Reno's developing tourism industry. That was the year the Nevada legislature legalized wide-opened gambling and lowered the residency requirement for a divorce from three months to six weeks.
That same year, Charles Thompson opened the Silver State Lodge…
View Story Show on Map
El Cortez Hotel
An Art Deco dazzler built for Abe Zetoony in 1931
Late in 1930, Nevada’s legislators pondered boosting the state’s lucrative divorce trade even further by shortening the residency requirement from three months to six short weeks. In anticipation of their success, local real estate investor Abe Zetoony commissioned the construction of the El Cortez…
View Story Show on Map
Mapes Hotel (site)
The luxury hotel-casino revolutionized Reno's gambling landscape upon its 1947 opening.
The 12-story Mapes Hotel became the tallest building in Nevada when it burst onto the Reno scene in 1947. Its prime location on the northeast corner of the Truckee River and Virginia Street had become available in 1934, when the old post office was replaced by the Art Deco-style building directly…
View Story Show on Map
El Reno Apartments (original site)
The grouping of 15 prefabricated steel homes designed by Paul Revere Williams opened in 1937.
In 1936, the architect Paul Revere Williams, who had completed at least two commissions in Reno by that time, designed two houses for the illustrious California House and Garden Exhibition. One was a French cottage, and the other was a three-room “Steel House.” The steel house employed modern…
View Story Show on Map
Park Wedding Chapel (site)
Reno's first freestanding wedding chapel opened across from the Washoe County Courthouse in 1956.
The Park Wedding Chapel, and the Sullivan Apartments next to it, were replaced by a modern commercial building in 2009, but the little chapel’s distinction comes from being Reno’s first wedding chapel. Joseph Melcher, a local advertising executive, and his wife Venila, opened their wedding business…
View Story Show on Map
Chapel of the Bells
One of Reno's first wedding chapels opened here in 1965.
When George Flint opened the Chapel of the Bells in 1961 at its original location at 540 W. Fourth Street, there were only two wedding chapels in town, the Park Wedding Chapel and a small chapel farther out on West Fourth Street. In 1965, he purchased a house on the corner of West Fourth and…
View Story Show on Map
Silver Bells Wedding Chapel (site)
The chapel operated in a converted bungalow duplex on Virginia Street.
The Silver Bells Wedding Chapel was owned and operated by pastors of a local church who were in the wedding business for more than 40 years. Once the first Reno wedding chapel opened in 1956, other chapels sprang up along major thoroughfares such as Fourth Street, the interstate highway, and…
View Story Show on Map