Est. 1927 · National Register of Historic Places · Reno Divorce-Capital Era · Frederic DeLongchamps Architecture
The corner of Virginia Street and the Truckee River has held lodging since the 1860s, when Myron Lake operated a hotel and toll bridge at the river crossing that gave Reno its early commercial footing. Lake, an early Reno landowner, died at his Lake House hotel on this site in 1884, decades before the present building rose. A series of hotels followed on the parcel as Reno grew.
The current Riverside Hotel was completed in 1927, financed by Nevada banker and mining figure George Wingfield and designed by Frederic DeLongchamps, the state's most prominent early-20th-century architect. The seven-story Art Deco building became a fixture of downtown Reno during the city's long run as the Divorce Capital of the World, when Nevada's short residency requirement drew people from across the country to wait out a six-week stay before filing. Guests at the Riverside and its neighbors made up a steady population of temporary residents, and the building became closely associated with that chapter of Reno history.
The hotel operated for six decades before closing in 1987. After years of vacancy, it was rehabilitated and reopened as the Riverside Artist Lofts, providing live-work residences for artists along the redeveloped Truckee Riverwalk. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains one of the most recognizable structures on the downtown riverfront.
Sources
- https://renohistorical.org/items/show/3
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_Hotel_(Reno,_Nevada)
Cold spotsApparitionsSense of a presence
The Riverside's haunted lore draws on the emotional weight of its history. For decades the building housed people who had come to Reno to end marriages, a transient population marked by upheaval, and that association feeds the stories told about the place. The death of Myron Lake on the earlier hotel that stood on this site adds a second strand to the lore, with some accounts linking a lingering presence to the property's earliest owner.
Reported phenomena are the familiar inventory of an old downtown hotel converted to apartments: cold spots in hallways and stairwells, the sense of a presence in unoccupied spaces, and occasional reports of an apparition. Because the building is now private residences, accounts come mainly from residents and from ghost-walk narration rather than from formal investigations.
Reno's downtown ghost-tour operators include the Riverside on their Truckee Riverwalk routes, where it is described as one of the city's haunted landmarks. The stories are anecdotal and unverified, but the building's prominence, its age, and its central place in Reno's divorce-capital history keep it in the city's haunted-history coverage.
Notable Entities
Myron Lake
