Rex Arlo Crider was an established chiropractor when he had this two-story combination commercial and apartment building constructed in 1936. An Iowa native, Crider had moved to Reno in 1915 to establish his practice after receiving his degree at the Palmer Chiropractic School in Davenport, Iowa. He had located his offices in various buildings around town before deciding to have his own built.
When it was ready, Crider and his second wife, Mae, moved into an apartment on the building’s west side and Crider opened his chiropractic office in one of the storefronts facing First Street, leasing the second to the La Mar Beauty Salon.
The cross street, Roff Way, was nearly named after Crider in 1936. The short diagonal street, only one block in length, was formerly known as West Avenue. After Crider’s building went up, property owners petitioned City Hall to change the street’s name to Crider Way to avoid confusion with adjacent West Street. Instead of Crider, city leaders chose to name the street after Nate Roff, a pioneering Reno resident and former state senator whose home long stood on the southwest corner of Second Street and West Avenue.
Crider added additional apartments, constructed in the same style, to the rear of the building in 1937. His offices shared the ground floor of the original portion with the beauty salon until his untimely death from a heart attack in 1944. By then, he had already taken on a partner, William Heath, who continued to practice out of the office until he was in turn succeeded by Dr. A. Van Heukelom in 1950 and Robert E. Jenkins after that.
In 1954, Crider’s son, John F. Crider, an architect, opened his office in the former salon space, but only for a few years. In 1958 it became the new home of the Christian Science Reading Room, which remained there into the 1970s. The second commercial space, then numbered 227, was occupied by a series of stockbrokers and savings and loan associations for many years. The law firm of Guild, Hagen and Clark was also a longtime occupant of the building.
In the early 2000s, the ground floor was known for housing the local art gallery La Bussola. Our Bar moved into the space in 2011, while the second floor houses a showroom for Henriksen Butler.
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