Woolworth's Building
Built by the Mapes family in 1965, the building housed the F.W. Woolworth store until 1997.

The building at the northwest corner of First and Virginia Streets known today as the Woolworth’s building was constructed in 1964-1965 as a direct replacement for the building that formerly stood at the same site, described in a separate entry for the Thoma-Bigelow Building (later, like this one, also known as the Mapes Building). The owners of that property, siblings Charles Mapes and Gloria Mapes Walker, wanted to provide a larger home for their anchor tenant, the F.W. Woolworth store, and also add multiple floors of office and commercial space.
Reno’s first Woolworth’s store had been a small storefront at 136 N. Virginia Street, established in 1912. The company had moved into the Thoma-Bigelow building formerly on this site in 1938. This new seven-story building, completed in the summer of 1965, provided Woolworth’s with 40,000 square feet of space divided among the basement, first, and second floors. Goods were sold on the basement and ground floors, with the ground floor also housing a restaurant originally called the Frontier Room. On the second floor were stock and utility rooms, an employee lounge, and offices. The store’s grand opening was held on July 14, 1965.
The Woolworth's store closed in 1997 when its parent company, F.W. Woolworth, announced that it would close all 400 of its stores nationwide due to operating losses that had totaled $37 million over the past year alone. Reno's other Woolworth's store at Park Lane Mall also closed. This immediately followed the closure of the Virginian Hotel Casino, and added to the sense of decline in the area, where the Mapes and Riverside Hotels had been vacant since the early 1980s.
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