Under Reno: The Tunnels Beneath Downtown and the Buildings That Still Hide Them

I have stood in three of them. Everyone who has lived in Reno long enough has heard about the tunnels under downtown, and most people file the stories with the ones about Sinatra and the mob. I did too, until I was shown a door in a basement wall that had been cut through two feet of river cobble and then filled, and then another, and then a third. After that the question stops being whether the tunnels are real. They are. The question becomes why a town that was never shy about anything else wrote so little down about them.

This is what the buildings say, read alongside the fire-insurance maps that recorded every basement in Reno from 1885 to 1955, and alongside the one thing the maps never drew: what happened under the sidewalks and the streets.

Why Reno Dug

Reno is a railroad town, auctioned into existence by the Central Pacific in May 1868, and it was built the way railroad towns were built: fast, in wood, along the tracks, and then again in brick after the fires. The brick buildings that went up between 1900 and 1915 stood on foundations of Truckee River cobble set in lime mortar, with cellars under the storefronts and vaults under the sidewalks for coal and deliveries. Nearly every commercial building on Virginia, Center, Second and Commercial Row had one. That is the first layer under downtown, and it is the one everybody forgets when they say there is nothing down there.

Then Nevada went dry, in December 1918, a year ahead of the rest of the country, and Reno did what Reno does. The Wine House on Commercial Row, open since 1874, sold through its back door for the next fifteen years. The alley behind it was called Bottle Alley, and the clubs that would make the town famous in the 1930s started in the basements off it. The Bank Club was running a clubroom in a basement on North Center Street before gambling was legal again in 1931. That same winter the police raided a den on the edge of town and watched their man go out through a trapdoor into a crawl space with two feet of clearance, which is the only time the papers ever described an escape passage in a Reno building and the only time they came close to the word tunnel. Thirty years before that, when the city went through Chinatown, the officers reported dugouts beneath the hovels and never went into them.

None of that is a tunnel system. All of it is a town that had every reason to go below grade, the foundations to do it in, and a habit of not writing it down.

Fourth and Evans: The Pair

The clearest one I know is on East Fourth Street, which was the Lincoln Highway from 1913 and sat one block from three railroad depots. In 1907 two immigrants put up two three-story brick buildings facing each other across the street. John Corsiglia, from Italy, built the Royal Hotel at 306 East Fourth, the building that is now The Jesse. John Barrett, an Irish stonemason whose marble and granite works stood on the corner, built the Hotel Richelieu at 301 East Fourth at Evans, the building that has been Louis' Basque Corner since 1967. Barrett cut the gate pillars at the university. He had a cutting yard on the corner and every tool a man needs to go through a foundation wall.

Through the whole of Prohibition the ground floors of both buildings were groceries and markets. The Royal had the Reno Bazaar and then the Columbus Cash Market and Sausage Factory through the 1920s. The Richelieu had the Star Grocery, Martin's Groceteria, the Pioneer Grocery and then the Lincoln Market until 1936, when it became the Lincoln Bar, open twenty-four hours with booths for ladies. Markets need cold cellars, and cellars under a sausage factory and a grocery on opposite sides of the same street are the most natural pair of rooms in Reno to connect.

They were connected. In the basement of 306 there are cuts along the north wall, the wall that faces Fourth Street, where the passage went under the highway to 301 across the street, which had a tunnel of its own. Both are filled now. The fill is not an argument against the tunnel. The fill is the tunnel's last entry in the record.

South Virginia: Under the Wild Orchid

The Wild Orchid sits at 515 South Virginia at California Avenue, on the lot that was the Ponderosa Hotel from 1966. Before the Ponderosa it was something more interesting. In 1918 the block was frame houses and a brick veterinary hospital with a corral at the back. By 1949 the lot at 515 through 521 had become an automobile sales and service building of reinforced concrete, with a boiler room, an iron chimney, and a concrete ramp down to a basement, so that cars could be driven below grade on a lot that had been pasture thirty years before. A below-ground level with a vehicle ramp on South Virginia, built sometime between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, is on the map in black and white.

From that basement a tunnel runs north along Virginia toward downtown. I have been in it. It does not go all the way anymore, but it did not start as a coal cellar either, and nobody builds a passage pointed at the center of town by accident.

West Second and the El Cortez Block

The block bounded by Commercial Row, West Street, West Second and Douglas Alley is the densest piece of underground Reno there is. The El Cortez at 239 West Second went up in 1931 with a full basement. Next to it on West Second, in the basement, is the third tunnel I have stood in. Around the corner on West Street the same block held the Chism ice cream plant, with fourteen-ton and twenty-ton ice machines, a bottling works, a bottled-drinks warehouse and cold storage. Across Second Street a wholesale electrical supply house was listed on the 1949 map as basement only, meaning the business existed entirely below the sidewalk. Interior of the block: a welding shop, a blacksmith, a private garage, and storefronts with rear addresses on Commercial Row.

On the Commercial Row side of that same block stands the DeGiacoma Building at 210 through 214, built in 1931 by Paul and Rose DeGiacoma, he from Turin, on the site of the frame house they had lived in since 1920. They built it with foundations for three stories and only ever put up one. Its first tenants were the Reno Italian French Grocery, selling olive oil and salami and imported canned goods, and a tavern called the Tap Room, which opened in 1931, two years before repeal, on a block that had Bottle Alley behind it and an ice plant with a bottling line around the corner. There was a tunnel in that basement. The building spent its later life as a slot-machine showroom, a war-surplus store and a deli, and most recently as the 1up bar; the passage was there under all of it. Nobody who built a one-story building on three-story footings in the middle of Prohibition was only thinking about groceries.

Second and Center: Two Doors in the Lyons Building

The corner of Second and Center is the center of the casino core, and the building on it is the E. C. Lyons Building at 190 North Center, which the Odd Fellows dedicated in June 1908 with the Farmers and Merchants Bank on the ground floor and their lodge rooms above. A fire took the top two floors in 1945; it came back as three stories in 1947 and spent its last working decades as Casino Jewelry and Loan, the pawn shop that moved there in 1985 from the old Masonic Hall on Commercial Row. It is vacant now, and its basement has been filmed.

The basement is 1908 Reno exactly: walls of river cobble in mortar, later concrete pilasters at the corners, a concrete floor, a sprinkler main overhead. In the wall that faces Second Street, directly under the Second Street sidewalk, there is a doorway-sized opening boarded over with plywood on a frame of two-by-fours. In the wall that faces Center Street, the street the city renamed University Way in 2021, there is a second one. The second is the one that matters, because its jamb is built of dressed, squared stone laid as quoins with the cobble butting against it. Nobody breaks through a foundation wall later and finishes the edge like that. That doorway was built into the wall as a doorway, by the men who built the building, and it leads under Center Street.

A coal vault needs one opening. Two, on two different streets, built into the original work of a lodge building on the most valuable corner in town, is a pattern. Across Second Street is the block the Club Cal Neva has occupied since 1948, and adjoining it on Center is Harrah's, which grew after 1946 by swallowing its neighbors and bridging the street above ground. The stories about Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe being moved between the casinos underground belong to the Cal Neva Lodge at Crystal Bay on Lake Tahoe, which Sinatra owned and whose tunnels to the cabins are real and can be walked today; Reno's Cal Neva shares only the name. The stories are not what makes the Lyons basement interesting. The stone jambs are.

The Ones That Are Gone

The Morris Hotel on East Fourth had tunnels. They have been filled. The Masonic Hall at Sierra and Commercial Row, the oldest commercial building in Reno, had a basement with failing wooden columns when the engineers went through it in 2007; it was taken down brick by brick in the winter of 2018 and the basement was filled and paved without anyone photographing it first. Every one of these losses happened the same way. A sidewalk gets rebuilt and the city orders the vault under it closed. A fire marshal looks at an opening in a foundation wall and wants it sealed. A casino expands and pours a new slab. In the 1960s the civil-defense people put fallout shelters under the Mapes, the El Cortez, Harolds Club and the downtown library, and whatever connected to whatever was concreted into a new purpose and forgotten.

That is why the written record never uses the word. The tunnels were never one system with a builder and a date. They were a hundred private decisions made below the sidewalk line by grocers, hoteliers, bootleggers and stonemasons, and private decisions do not file permits. What they leave is cuts in cobble walls, doorways with dressed jambs, concrete ramps on the insurance maps, and fill.

At a Glance: Underground Reno

• 306 and 301 East Fourth at Evans — the Royal Hotel (1907, John Corsiglia; now The Jesse) and the Hotel Richelieu (1907, John Barrett, stonemason; now Louis' Basque Corner). Groceries and a sausage factory over both basements through Prohibition. Cuts in the north wall of 306 where the passage went under the Lincoln Highway to 301. Filled.
• 515–521 South Virginia (Wild Orchid) — reinforced-concrete auto sales and service building with a concrete ramp to the basement on the 1949 map; Ponderosa Hotel from 1966. Tunnel runs north toward downtown.
• West Second beside the El Cortez (1931, full basement) — same block as the Chism ice plant, bottling works and cold storage.
• 210–214 West Commercial Row (DeGiacoma Building, 1931) — three-story foundations with one story built; the Reno Italian French Grocery and the Tap Room, open two years before repeal; later the 1up bar. Tunnel in the basement.
• 190 North Center (E. C. Lyons Building, 1908) — two boarded doorways in the foundation: one under the Second Street sidewalk, one with dressed-stone jambs under Center Street. Cal Neva block across Second; Harrah's adjoining on Center.
• Morris Hotel, East Fourth — tunnels, filled.
• 98 West Commercial Row (Masonic Hall, 1872–2018) — basement filled and paved unphotographed.
• Documented in print: the Bank Club's basement clubroom on North Center before 1931; the Wine House back door and Bottle Alley; the 1931 trapdoor and crawl-space escape; the Chinatown dugouts of 1908; the 1960s fallout shelters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are the Reno tunnels real?

Yes. I have been in them — on South Virginia, on West Second, on East Fourth and on Commercial Row — and a fourth building, the Lyons Building at Second and Center, has two sealed doorways in its 1908 foundation that have been filmed. Most are filled now, which is how they were closed, not evidence that they were never there.

Were they built for Prohibition?

Some were and some were older. Reno's brick downtown was built between 1900 and 1915 on cobble foundations with cellars and sidewalk vaults, and Nevada went dry in December 1918. The buildings at Fourth and Evans and the Lyons Building predate Prohibition; the El Cortez and DeGiacoma buildings were put up in 1931, in the middle of it. What Prohibition did was give every one of those cellars a reason to connect to the next.

Why don't the old newspapers mention them?

Because the people who dug them were the people with the most to lose from a paragraph in the paper, and because a connected cellar was not news in a town where the Wine House sold liquor through its back door for fifteen years without anyone pretending otherwise. The papers recorded the basements, the raids, the trapdoors and the dugouts. They never had reason to write the word tunnel.

Can I see one?

The buildings on East Fourth are open businesses and their owners decide what they show. The Lyons Building is private and vacant. Walk Commercial Row and Douglas Alley and look for the glass prism lights and iron hatches in the old sidewalks; those are the roofs of the vaults, and the vaults are where every one of these stories begins.

Conclusion

Reno has spent a century filling in its own basements and then wondering what was down there. The answer is not a secret city. It is a stonemason's doorway under Center Street, a sausage maker's cellar under the Lincoln Highway, a car dealer's ramp on South Virginia, an Italian grocer's three-story footings under a one-story building on Commercial Row, and the passages that ran between them when running between them was worth the digging. The buildings still carry the marks. The only thing that was ever missing was somebody willing to say, in print, that they had seen them.

We are always drawn to the places where Nevada's history is still out there to be touched. To bring a piece of old Reno home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points. The newspaper account of the trapdoor escape is the Nevada State Journal of December 5, 1931. The building histories draw on the Sanborn fire-insurance maps of Reno for 1918 and 1949, which record every basement, ramp and cold-storage room on these blocks and are free to view at the Library of Congress.

• Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Reno, 1918 (Library of Congress) — South Virginia is sheet 42, West Second and Commercial Row sheet 5, East Fourth sheet 17.
• Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Reno, 1949 (Library of Congress) — the concrete ramp at 515–521 South Virginia, the Chism plant and the "basement only" warehouse on West Second, the Hotel Dude at Fourth and Evans.
• Reno Historical: Royal Hotel / The Jesse, 306 E. Fourth and Hotel Richelieu / Louis' Basque Corner, 301 E. Fourth.
• Reno Historical: DeGiacoma Building, 210–214 W. Commercial Row.
• Reno Historical: E. C. Lyons Building, 190 N. Center.
• Nevada Historical Society — photographs and city directories for every block named here.

Hero image: Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Reno, Nevada, 1918, sheet 5 — West Second Street, Commercial Row and Douglas Alley. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division; public domain.