Reno struggles to protect divorce-era icons like the 1927 Silver State Lodge, where Bing Crosby and Greta Garbo once stayed.

Story from the archives by Barbara Benham / June 25, 2004

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The Silver State Lodge

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Reno, Nev., reigned as the undisputed divorce capital of the country. In the era before no-fault divorce, thousands flocked to Reno to take advantage of some of the most liberal separation statues in the country. Walter Winchell dubbed the phenomenon "a Reno-vation"; others called it "taking the Reno cure." Clare Boothe Luce wrote her hit play "The Women" after obtaining a Reno divorce in 1929, and Arthur Miller based his 1961 film "The Misfits" on his 1956 sojourn.

A Reno divorce was simple: Instead of having to show cause, like infidelity, a person only needed to fulfill Nevada's residency requirement. To boost Reno's odds as a destination, the state legislature twice lowered the residency requirement, from six months to three months in 1927, and in 1931 to just six weeks.

The result was a housing crunch, as hordes crammed into Reno's hotels, ranches, and boarding houses to achieve marital liberation. Some even camped in tents along Reno's Truckee River.

Today, many of these divorce-era properties are gone. Hoping to salvage the remaining few, Preserve Nevada, a group that was founded last year, put one of them on its first-ever list of endangered historic places: the Silver State Lodge, 16 log-cabin-style cottages and a main lodge, built in 1927 on what was the Lincoln Highway.

Silver State Lodge (Preserve Nevada)

In April 2002, Preserve Nevada noted that the Silver State faced possible demolition or relocation. For now, reports of the Silver State's demise are slightly exaggerated. After the owner couldn't maintain the mortgage's loan-to-value ratio, Specialty Financial Acquisition, a Reno-based mortgage broker, assumed control of the site in mid-April. It plans to renovate the cottages and lodge to attract better renters, says Jeff Hollingsworth, a principal with Specialty Financial. (Since the mid-1990s, the Silver State rented to low-income families on a weekly basis.) The renovations are slated to start this summer, after tenants moved out earlier this month. Hollingsworth says his company will eventually cash in on Reno's skyrocketing real-estate market and sell the property, which also includes a cement duplex built in the 1950s. The 5.09-acre Silver State parcel is currently listed with local realtor Dickson Realty for $1,495,000.

In its heyday in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the Silver State catered to motor tourists, stars like Bing Crosby, lounge acts, and western entertainers in town for the rodeo, recalls 64-year-old Reno resident Pat Klos, whose parents owned and ran the lodge from the late 1930s through the 1960s. One morning, Klos' mother looked out and saw that a tall, slender woman in a turban and sunglasses had lifted Klos from her playpen. "My mother went dashing out," recounts Klos, who lived at the Silver State until she was in the fourth grade. "It turned out to be Greta Garbo."

One of the Silver State's 16 cottages (Preserve Nevada)

The cottages, with their knotty-pine-paneled walls and ceilings, were named for trees: The Cottonwood, The Tamarac, The Oak, The Cypress, and the Elm, the "the finest of the cottages," Klos says, "larger than the others, with a native stone fireplace." The Silver State had its share of divorce guests, many of whom, Klos remembers, rented cabins during the winter, when rates dropped from $50 a day to $50 a week.

Near the Silver State, the few old motels dotting West Fourth Street are in the same general state of decline as the lodge, but Mella Rothwell Harmon, an architectural historian with the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office, notes that the area is ripe for redevelopment. "I think it would take someone with a certain degree of creativity and vision to turn the Silver State into a functioning hotel," Harmon says. "But the site is buffered sufficiently from surrounding properties to warrant the effort and expense. There is certainly heritage-tourism potential in the vicinity of Silver State."

Whether a preservation-minded investor will rescue the Silver State is anyone's guess. "There aren't a lot of preservation developers in this part of the country," notes Bert Bedeau of Preserve Nevada, and "It's a tough location as a tourist lodging." The Silver State, situated about a mile from Reno's casino district and far from the freeway, isn't ideally located. Also, it doesn't fall within Reno's redevelopment boundaries, which would make it eligible for loans and other incentives.

The Silver State is playing second fiddle to other divorce-era preservation efforts, like the Virginia State Bridge, from which newly divorced women tossed their wedding rings into the Truckee River. Another group is working to restore Courtroom Number One at the Washoe County Courthouse, built in 1873, where final separation decrees were issued.

Reno's track record of saving its divorce icons is mixed: Downtown's Mapes Hotel was demolished in January 2000. Yet the Hotel Riverside, where Clare Boothe Luce stayed in 1929, was converted to artists' lofts in the mid-1990s.

So far, no one has gotten around to listing the Silver State on the National Register of Historic Places. Bedeau says it's eligible for its historical significance, association with the divorce era, and architectural merit. "We're in the early stages of trying to find a solution," Bedeau says. "We're going to have to spin the wheel and see what happens."

Barbara Benham, a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C., writes for Travel + Leisure and other magazines.

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