The Morris Hotel

Nevada had changed its mind about two things that spring. In March 1931 the legislature legalized gambling and cut the residency requirement for divorce to six weeks. Reno was about to fill with people who needed somewhere to stay for exactly a month and a half.

That summer, Frank Charles Savage — recently retired from his family's plumbing firm, Savage & Son — put his money into a three-story brick building at the corner of Fourth and Morrill. Forty rooms across the top two floors, each with a large window. Shared bathrooms. A telephone on every hall, with a buzzer in each room to tell you a call had come.

The location was the whole argument. The Southern Pacific depot stood three blocks west. The Western Pacific depot — built for the narrow-gauge Nevada-California-Oregon line — was practically across the street. And Fourth Street itself carried the Lincoln Highway, the first road laid out to take an automobile across the continent, later the Victory Highway and then U.S. 40.

Everything a traveler needed accumulated along this stretch: hotels, garages, cafés, and the businesses that served people who had arrived from somewhere and were going somewhere else. Fourth Street stayed the main route through Reno until Interstate 80 opened in the mid-1970s and took the traffic with it.

Savage never ran the hotel himself. He leased the operation to a succession of managers, and each one tended to rename it. It opened on 24 October 1931 as the Bonney Hotel, for its first manager, Clara Bonney — who died of pneumonia a month later. After that it was the Bonnie Blue, then the Hotel Tennant, then the Del Paso.

Savage died in 1935 and his widow sold the building. It changed hands again in 1949, to a general contractor named E. F. Morris, who was killed in a car accident within months of buying it. His name is the one that stuck. It has been the Morris ever since.

The rooms upstairs housed people. The street level did business, and the list of what it has held reads like a century of Reno in miniature: a tire store, a boxing gym, a flower shop, an appliance service center, and — in February 1941 — Dorothy Romaine's dress shop, an elegant clothing boutique behind these same windows.

Eighty-five years later the space sells furniture, art, and objects with histories of their own. We did not choose the address for the symmetry, but we noticed it.

The Cowley family ran the Morris as a residency hotel for decades and changed remarkably little. The lobby looked much the same in 2013 as it had in the 1950s — pressed tin ceiling, original light fixture, the ornate detail of a much older era carried forward simply because nobody removed it. In 1993 a film crew used that lobby for Cobb, with Tommy Lee Jones, precisely because it had never been modernized.

Buildings survive by being unfashionable at the right moments. This one was.

In 2026 the E. Fourth Street Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places — a 1.07-mile stretch running east from Evans Avenue, 136 buildings across 28 blocks, of which 101 contribute to the district. The nomination rests on transportation: the railroad first, then the highway, and the whole economy that grew up between them.

The Morris is one of those buildings. It was built for that traffic, outlasted it, and is still standing on the same corner.

The ground floor is ours. Tall windows onto Fourth Street, the original proportions intact, and a collection arranged the way rooms actually work rather than the way retail floors usually do.

Pieces that photograph flat look entirely different standing in a room with light on them. That is the argument for coming in person.