Nevada Territory's Best
Restoring Carson City’s St. Charles Hotel.
By: Jana Bommersbach 01/01/2009
You have to go back some 146 years—back to the days of Nevada Territory—to hear the kind of bragging about the St. Charles hotel that is common today.
It was such a grand building for Carson City, and its developers made sure everyone knew it: “We have the largest and best hotel building in the Territory,” they boasted in an ad that ran on October 2, 1862—two years before Nevada was welcomed into the nation as the 36th state. This hotel had the town’s first electricity, first gas utilities and was a centerpiece of the community.
The three-story brick building sat in the heart of town, across the street from an empty lot that today is home to the State Capitol. The hotel’s original owners probably never dreamed it would end up with six names and 16 owners; nor that it would decay into a “flop house”—with a kitchen so bad, it was called a “slop house”—and its beautiful bricks covered in plaster. No, the founders knew they were building something special. How gratified they would be to see that the St. Charles Hotel again has bragging rights.
This is the oldest, continuously operating hotel in all of Nevada—yes, even in its seedy days, it was still a hotel. The St. Charles is also the second oldest building in the state still standing, while so many others built in its era have been torn down. Just as the hotel gave a focus to the small Carson City mining and lumber community in its day, today it’s helping rejuvenate a historic downtown as a centerpiece of the community.
People who call Carson City their hometown—including a former high school swimming champion—saw how much life was still left in the grand place.
The first “saviors” of this historic building were Mark and Jenny Lopiccolo—he a builder and remodeler with his own construction company; she a realtor who’d become the “driving force” behind the hotel’s rebirth.
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