Coney Island Bar: Sparks' Tamale Factory Turned Neighborhood Landmark

Where East Fourth Street gives way to Prater Way, just inside the Sparks line and hard beside the Interstate 80 on-ramp, a low brick building has been pouring drinks and plating lunch for generations. The Coney Island Bar sits at 2644 Prater Way, on a corner that began in the mid-1920s as a tamale factory, put on its brick in the 1930s, and served its first legal drink on March 16, 1946. One family, the Gallettis, has run it ever since.

The shorthand you hear puts the tamale factory around 1945. The dates actually run the other way: the tamales came first, twenty years earlier, and the bar was the postwar addition. What follows is the longer story of a roadside corner that outlasted an amusement park, a highway, and a freeway that took the family's own houses.

A Railroad Town's Fourth Street

Sparks was born in 1904 as a Southern Pacific railroad town, and it never stopped being a working one. Its main street was B Street, today's Victorian Avenue. The road that fed it from Reno was Fourth Street, which carried the Lincoln Highway across the valley floor and, at the Reno–Sparks line, became Prater Way on its run east toward the Sparks downtown. The Coney Island stands at that hinge, and it takes its name from the neighborhood around it.

That neighborhood was Coney Island, named for a Coney Island–style resort and amusement park built across the street in the early 1900s. The park is long gone; the name stuck to the street for decades and still rides on the bar. Around it lay orchards, kitchen gardens, chickens and rabbits, a corner grocery, and the family homes of the people who worked the rails and the hotels. Midway along the same stretch of road, Casale's Halfway Club kept the Italian table for travelers. In the 1970s the freeway cut through all of it, taking the family's own houses and setting an off-ramp near the front door.

From Tamale Factory to Saloon

The story starts with Ralph Galletti, born in Genoa, who came by way of San Francisco and in 1922 bought the Sugar Plum, a confectionery and lunch counter on West Second Street in Reno. His wife, Mary, was a Gallo, and her father had bought the family ground out in the Coney Island neighborhood around 1905. In the mid-1920s the Gallettis sold the Sugar Plum and moved the business there as the Coney Island Tamale Factory: tamales, enchiladas and ravioli, sold wholesale to local restaurants and over the counter, with the chicken coops out back. The first building was wood, later dragged down the alley behind the family house.

In the mid-1930s Ralph replaced the wooden building with the brick one that stands today, a lunch room built for roughly six thousand dollars; the basement still has its dirt floor. After the Second World War his son John, called "Tamale John," came home and took out a liquor license. The bar opened on March 16, 1946, with John behind it, his sister Nettie running the front of the house, and a hired bartender behind the stick. By the mid-1950s a new kitchen had gone in, the tamales had faded from the menu, and the sign read Coney Island Cocktail Bar & Restaurant. The enchiladas, roast beef sandwiches, Thursday corned beef and cabbage, and a house Picon Punch carried on.

The Oldest Bar in Sparks

It is the title the neighborhood gives the Coney, and it is a fond one more than a literal one. The bar license dates to 1946, and Sparks, a railroad town since 1904, had saloons long before that, so no ledger awards this crown. What the record does hold is rarer: one family on one corner, from the 1920s tamale factory straight through to the present day, among the longest-running family businesses in Northern Nevada. The State of Nevada recognized the building on its Register of Historic Places in 2007.

It earned its reputation the way a corner bar does, by being the room where a neighborhood met. Coaches and referees gathered here after high school and university games, and regulars came from every walk of life. The Copenhagen Bar, run by the Quilici family, was the rival down the road. Three out-of-control vehicles once hit the building within a single year, and it stood.

Coney Island Today

The Coney Island is open and still family-run, by Greg Galletti, Ralph's grandson, with his family. The short street beside it carries the family name, Galletti Way. The kitchen keeps the old repertoire, with lunch through the week, private banquet dinners, and public dinners on Fridays. Hours shift with the season, so call ahead before you go.

At a Glance: Coney Island Bar, Sparks

• 2644 Prater Way, Sparks, Nevada, where East Fourth Street becomes Prater Way beside the I-80 on-ramp.
• Opened in the mid-1920s as the Coney Island Tamale Factory, founded by Ralph and Mary Galletti.
• The brick building went up in the mid-1930s; the bar opened March 16, 1946, under John Galletti.
• Named for the Coney Island resort and amusement park that once stood across the street.
• The Galletti family has run the corner for nearly a century.
• Listed on the Nevada State Register of Historic Places in 2007.
• Open today; call ahead for current hours.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is the Coney Island Bar?

At 2644 Prater Way in Sparks, at the point where East Fourth Street from Reno becomes Prater Way, beside the Interstate 80 on-ramp. It is east of Reno's downtown but short of downtown Sparks and Victorian Avenue.

Was it really a tamale factory?

Yes. It opened in the mid-1920s as the Coney Island Tamale Factory, selling tamales, enchiladas and ravioli. The bar came in 1946, and the tamales eventually left the menu.

Is it the oldest bar in Sparks?

It is the one locals most often name. The bar license dates to 1946, so the claim is better read as the oldest family-run corner in the area than as the oldest liquor license.

Who owns it now?

The Galletti family. Greg Galletti, grandson of founder Ralph Galletti, runs it.

Conclusion

The Coney Island Bar is a Fourth Street story in miniature: an immigrant's lunch counter, a tamale kitchen on cheap ground between two towns, a brick room built in the Depression, a license won by a returning soldier, and a freeway that took the houses and left the bar. It has the patina that cannot be manufactured, the kind that comes only from the same hands on the same corner for the better part of a century.

We keep returning to the roads and rooms that built the Truckee Meadows at The Eclection. To bring a little of that era home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points:

• Reno Historical: Coney Island Bar — the building's history, photographs, and the Galletti family story.
• Online Nevada Encyclopedia: Fourth Street & Prater Way Oral Histories — Hugh Rossolo remembers the Coney Island Bar.
• Sparks Heritage Museum — the local museum of Sparks history.

Hero image: a vintage Olympia Brewing Company flat-top beer can, c. 1950s, from The Eclection's own collection. It is an object of the postwar bar era, not a photograph of the Coney Island Bar.