Royal Hotel

This 1907 hotel on East 4th Street and Evans Avenue profited from its proximity to three railroad lines.

Neighborhood bar By the 1980s, the building's ground floor housed a series of neighborhood bars. Source: Special Collections, University of Nevada, Reno Libraries Date: ca. 1980s

John Corsiglia had this three-story brick building constructed on his property at Fourth and Peavine (later Evans Avenue) in 1907 for $20,000. A native of Italy, Corsiglia had immigrated to the United States in 1870, reportedly working for a time as a miner and stagecoach driver in Virginia City.

By the 1890s, Corsiglia and his family were living in Reno, where he bought property on E. Second Street, and by 1903, operated a blacksmith shop on Peavine, just south of where the hotel now stands. In 1906, he moved his family into a wood frame house next door to the shop and hired contractors Clock & Shea to build the hotel from designs by local architects Woodard & Comstock. It opened in November 1907 as the Royal Hotel, with the Royal Bar on the ground floor cleverly offering free lunch with drinks.

Although opening the same year as the Hotel Richelieu directly across Fourth Street, the Royal was more modest in size, offering just 14 rooms for rent on two upper floors with a single bathroom on each floor. Seeking “steady roomers,” the Royal appealed mostly to workers and divorcees waiting out their temporary residency. Its proximity to the Southern Pacific and Nevada-California-Oregon Railroad depots gave it a distinct advantage. Changing management renamed the hotel the Rochester and then the Abbott House in the 1920s, but by 1930 and for decades afterwards, it was known as the Marion Hotel.

The Royal Bar on the ground floor experienced its own transformations, becoming a grocery called the Reno Bazaar in the 1920s. In the thirties and forties, it was called the Victory Market and then the Lincoln Market, referencing the transcontinental Victory and Lincoln Highways, which converged along Fourth Street through Reno. As the demand for markets along the corridor decreased, the space was devoted to retail, from used furniture to appliances, and then to a series of bars and clubs. The building housed a bar called the Lincoln Lounge through summer of 2018. It was completely renovated and reopened as the Jesse Hotel & Bar in the summer of 2019.