Gaming is like a mold that penetrates much of the city, audaciously visible in certain sectors and subtly annoying in others. Clubs and bars have gaming machines. Restaurants have gaming machines. Most of the full-time residents seem to ignore it, just as citizens in other cities take towering bank buildings for granted. Though it’s more appropriate to have rapacious forms of vice considered as such instead of legitimized as honorable and productive–as if banks and ad agencies aren’t sucking the labor and health out of people. But for Renoites, the casinos become part of the infrastructure, like lampposts, sewer drains, bridges, alcoholism, unemployment… Nevada has the 6th highest rate of unemployment in the country at 12.1%, despite that it has no personal or corporate income taxes. According to prevailing neoliberal wisdom, Nevada should be thriving. Instead, it relies on gambling taxes for revenue, so the state’s public institutions are being slashed. Who would’ve thought? The casinos I did venture into were depopulated–desperately so, as if the faith in striking it rich by chance, so intrinsic to the lore of the area, had been extinguished with the recession.
Not everything in the city is so dour. Unlike Las Vegas, the gaming areas are relatively small, and it’s easy to penetrate beneath their spectacles. Hidden behind the casinos are some beautiful public spaces. The promenade along the river forms a central, attractive and apparently useful space for non-commercial socialization. The city allowed enough of a buffer zone between this area and the surrounding commercial districts that it doesn’t seem hemmed in and claustrophobic. Reno’s downtown core is flat and easily walkable, and its architecture is fairly variegated in comparison with many cities in the mountain west. For all its brightly-lit garishness, Reno doesn’t have Boise’s brown-brick blandness, its intense fidelity to the nondescript.
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