Downtown Sparks, with its Victorian Square, has its occasional events like the Rib Cook Off and its July 4th fireworks. It has a nice Sparks Heritage Museum, which shows off its proud railroad heritage.
It’s very clean and tidy, and feels like a small town downtown with its neat bricks and clean sidewalks. It also seems predictable, which some people like, and geared toward older locals and tourists.
We sent photographer Madison Wanco to have a current look (with her photos for this article) and she came away impressed.
She wrote: “Downtown Sparks has a lot of historic buildings that showcase the area's old and charming architecture… The area is very clean… The buildings in the area would also make a great background for a photoshoot as well as the cute gazebo. There is a good amount of parking and everything is also very close together.”
Contrast that with Virginia Street in downtown Reno, and its never ending placemaking studies, new consultants being paid to advise, and long Council discussions, lack of parking, shuttered stores painted over with murals and overall grittiness, and it’s a diverging tale of two adjoined cities.
Both downtowns are anchored by casino business, the Nugget in Sparks, and The Row in Reno, but the similarities end there.
We don’t really see downtown Sparks becoming something else than what it is currently, but do still wish for a different downtown Reno.
Couldn’t we find a way to have more on the downtown portion of Virginia Street, such as simple bike lanes (the more of those everywhere the better), wider sidewalks with tables outside for dining, added parking, more permits for eloteros, food trucks and hot dog vendors to set up shop in empty lots, offering popular items such as bagels, boba tea ands deserts, to attract more people during the day on regular days?
Couldn’t we take out the hostile architecture and replace it with shaded places for people to sit and relax.
We could take over the Locomotion Plaza and the dog park and turn them into open public spaces with added features for cooling down or warming up, depending on the season, for shared community meals at night and free, open music and craft fairs, maker spaces, healthy food markets, pop up thrifting, during the day, every day.
Virginia Street could become a friendly, open to all, even more vibrant extension of Midtown, alongside the casinos and into its university portion going north, bringing together different demographics and making them all feel welcome.