Legends marina sparks development

SPARKS — The Biggest Little City in the World’s little stepsister is growing up.

Long in the shadow of its neighbor Reno to the west, the century-old town of Sparks is capping a decade of revitalization with a $1 billion shopping and entertainment center, covering 130 acres on the edge of a bustling marina along U.S. Interstate 80.

“This project is going to put Sparks on the map,” City Councilman Ron Smith said at last month’s groundbreaking ceremony for the Legends at Sparks Marina.

“To put it in perspective, our city’s entire worth is about $2.2 billion and this project by itself is $1 billion,” Councilman Mike Carrigan said.

Once called “East Reno,” Sparks was known primarily as a blue-collar working-class town, nicknamed the “Rail City” as it grew along the “wrong” side of the Southern Pacific Railway tracks across from its more well-heeled neighbor.

“Reno was the city; Sparks was the country. Reno was a big town; Sparks was a small town,” said Ian Schultz, 35, a Sparks native who claims he’s still mad about being born in Reno because Sparks didn’t have its own hospital then.

Just 50 years ago, the land where the Legends is being built was a cattle ranch and feedlot well east of the city limits. Later, the 120-foot deep Helms gravel pit occupied the area.

And that’s where the new chapter in Sparks history began, thanks to the New Year’s Day Flood of 1997. The Truckee River flowing down from the Sierra Nevada poured out of its banks, flooding downtown Reno and Sparks and eventually filling up the pit.

After making plans to pump the pit dry, the city changed course with the vision of the 80-acre, man-made lake.

Today, it is stocked with trout and home to two public beaches, boat rentals, picnic areas, sand volleyball courts, bicycle and hiking trails. Over the past five years, restaurants and bars have started popping up along with condominiums.

Steve Scheels, founder of the prominent Midwest Scheels sporting goods chain, recalls the first time the developer approached him about building one of his megastores in northern Nevada.

“I want to be truthful. I’d heard of Reno, but I’d never heard of Sparks until about five years ago,” Scheels said.

He remembers exactly what he told Steve Graham, vice president of Destination Development for RED Development based in Kansas City, Mo.

“I said, ‘We have no interest in coming to Sparks, Nevada. It is too far out of our geographic location. We have too many good opportunities in Milwaukee and Minneapolis and Madison (Wis.) and Boise (Idaho).'”

“He said, ‘I’m going to fly up there and tell you why you want to open a store in Sparks, Nevada.'”

The 250,000-square-foot Scheels store, one-fourth larger than the company’s flagship location in Fargo, N.D., will be one of the anchors of the mall when it opens in October 2008. Also planned are a 1,000-room hotel-casino and a dinosaur-themed restaurant, T. Rex: A Prehistoric Adventure, by the creator of the Rainforest Cafe.

“I think this project takes on monumental consequences for retail development across the United States,” said Steve Schussler, who founded the Rainforest Cafe restaurants.

He described how RED’s Graham came into his office and put a pin on his map showing where he was going to put the T-Rex.

Graham told him, “You will be opening in Sparks.”

Unlike the 45 Rainforest Cafes he opened around the world, Schussler has signed a deal with Walt Disney World that limits the number of T-Rex restaurants to nine, including one under construction in Orlando, Fla.

“The significance of picking Sparks to open up one of the T-Rexes is off the chart,” Schussler said.

It’s all pretty heady stuff for a place that started with only a few homesteads along the railroad tracks at the turn of the century. The town was renamed after Gov. John Sparks in 1905.

Now, 102 years later, a Sparks native, Jim Gibbons, is only the second in state history to call the governor’s mansion home.

“I think we are coming of age as a community,” Gibbons said.

Sparks’ population has grown 54 percent from 54,310 in 1990 to 83,351 in 2006, compared to Reno’s growth of 58 percent from 133,850 to 211,697 during the same period.

It’s a far cry from the 10,000 to 15,000 people who lived in Sparks when Gibbons grew up in a small house several blocks from the railroad in the 1950s and his mother ran for Sparks mayor and lost.

In those days, Reno and Sparks residents engaged in an intense rivalry that locals say started to ease only in about the past decade as new development came to the area.

Jeano Dendary, the son of a Basque immigrant who played on Reno High’s state championship baseball team in 1977, still is known to his friends as “Jeano from Reno” even though he long since has moved to Sparks.

Dendary, 48, who operated a bakery for years and is a longtime employee of a century-old local dairy, recalls the way Reno looked down on Sparks.

“They were the redheaded stepchildren of Washoe County,” Dendary said.

“And we hated Reno for it,” Schultz said. “The people who lived in Sparks worked in the warehouses and casinos. The people who lived in Reno owned the warehouses and the casinos.”

Now Sparks will be home to a development that features 1.3 million square feet of retail space and a Triple-A baseball stadium if community leaders can pull off their plan to lure a team.

“It will be able to compete with all the other entertainment enterprises that are in the Western part of the country, California and Las Vegas and even Reno entertainment,” Gibbons said, reflecting the civic pride over the complex.

But not all residents are as effusive as the governor.

Don Young worries that city officials have failed to address the 32 percent increase in traffic that the Regional Transportation Commission is predicting at the marina’s I-80 exits.

The longtime Sparks resident and retired county planner helped develop the original plans for the marina after the flood in 1997.

Young and his wife bought a retirement home at the marina and are looking forward to walking to shops and restaurants, but he’s also unhappy the casino will block the sun from his home on some days.

“It appears the city was so anxious to get the development here they may not have required some things we think the developer should have to do to mitigate some of the impacts,” said Young, a member of a group called Citizens for Sensible Growth.

The original traffic studies were based on plans for a 100-room casino, he said.

The recently amended plans for the 1,000-room resort call for a 275-foot tall tower within 75 feet of the subdivision where Young lives.

“We’re going to be shadowed half of a winter day, denied solar access in the shade with icy driveways,” he said. “I was a planner for 25 years, so we knew this area would be developed; but we expected the city of Sparks to protect us.”

Norm Diana, owner of Q&D Construction building the mall, admits to some mixed feelings, as well. He fondly recalls the days his grandfather and uncle grew potatoes on a neighboring ranch a half century ago.

“I miss some of the ranching,” he said.

Bob Larkin, chairman of the Washoe County Commission, sees the new entertainment center as the crown jewel of redevelopment that started in the mid-1990s.

Since then, Sparks has renovated downtown with an old Main Street theme called Victorian Square, featuring brick sidewalks, gas-lamp street lights and an interactive fountain in front of a 14-screen movie theater.

Thursday evenings in the summer, a six-block stretch is closed to traffic and packed with thousands of visitors at the Hometown Farmer’s Market. Vendors set up tents with fresh fruits and vegetables, authentic Mexican food, tri-tip steak sandwiches and corn dogs. Bands play and the Great Basin Brewery brings its kegs outdoors with flavors like “Ichty Ale,” named after the state dinosaur, ichthyosaur.

The Hot August Nights celebration of classic cars started in Reno but now also has a big presence in Sparks, where many prefer to make the scene in a more small-town environment than Reno’s main casino drag.

Sparks’ biggest single event, which drew an estimated 500,000 last Labor Day weekend, is the Best in the West Nugget Rib Cook-off hosted by John Ascuaga’s Nugget hotel-casino, the city’s largest employer with about 2,000 workers.

With such recent successes, Sparks Mayor Geno Martini has taken to calling Reno Mayor Bob Cashell “the mayor of West Sparks.”

“Bob, we’re gaining on you, pal, let me tell you,” he told his friend at last month’s groundbreaking.

Cashell smiled and responded politely: “You sure are.”