14 Midtown buildings get plaques describing their unique history
The Midtown Historical Plaque project, put together by local historian Alicia Barber, highlights the unique history of specially selected buildings in Midtown Reno.
How long does someone have to be in Nevada to be a “local?”
A lot of locals argue that being born here is the only thing that matters. That’s an increasingly narrow scope, because Nevada by far has the fewest born-in-state residents at just 27%.
In contrast, California-born Nevada residents make up 46% of the population. The odds are pretty good that if you hear someone complaining about new arrivals, they only showed up here from Palo Alto in 2021. (“I moved here five years ago for the wide-open vistas over my back fence,” they say. “Now there’s a whole new housing development behind me, ruining the entire vibe! What gives?”)
Yes, we all see the guy in the ski googles and dust-covered fur coat, just ignore him
I’d argue that people are local when they start ignoring weird Reno stuff.
Last week, I asked readers what their “Reno-est” experiences were, and Laura Briscoe talked about flying out of Reno-Tahoe right after Burning Man.
“The airport was full of scruffy, unwashed-looking characters dressed in black with lots of metallic adornments, women in torn fishnet stockings and heavy black boots, and they were all coated in white dust,” Briscoe wrote. “The only people looking askance at them were obviously not from Reno.”
We might mutter to ourselves about Burners, but after more than three decades of Burning Man shenanigans, at least we’ve stopped gawking at them like idiots.
Of course, that’s not the only thing we’re successfully ignoring — like, say, slot machines in grocery stores. The outsiders are probably right; that’s kind of weird.
Blood, sweat and tears. Tears from wildfire smoke, that is
Or maybe local-ness is something that must be earned.
Living through at least one boom-and-bust cycle — and sticking it out anyway — would be a good place to start. That would mean nobody’s really local if they weren’t here before the housing market bottomed out in 2012.
At minimum, someone should live through a big snow year or a rough wildfire year, right? Our last big winter was 2022-23, when snow collapsed roofs in the Sierra; our most recent wildfire year was 2024, when the Davis Fire destroyed 12 homes, threatened hundreds more and canceled several days of school.
Seems like that kind of suffering should bring some sort of solidarity to everyone who experienced it, right?
What’s the ‘tell’ that someone’s not local?
What’s your personal tell that someone isn’t from around here? Is it mispronouncing Kietzke or Kuenzli? Or talking about the UNR Wolf Pack game? Is it asking dumb questions like whether or not Lake Tahoe is manmade? Or referring to the freeways as “the 80” or “the 580”? (Or, for that matter, calling the north-south freeway “580” instead of “395”?) Let me know at bmcginness@rgj.com, and vote in the poll below as to what makes someone a legitimate local.
Brett McGinness is the engagement editor for the Reno Gazette Journal. He’s also the writer of The Reno Memo — a free newsletter about news in the Biggest Little City.
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