Glory days

Congratulations, Northern Nevada! This Biggest Little Best of Northern Nevada is the one editorial every year when you can count on us just to express our real fondness for this place where we live. The staff of the Reno News & Review are all here in Reno because we like it here. There’s not a staff person, on the editorial side at least, who has lived in this state for less than two decades. We’re here because we know and appreciate the culture. Our families our here. We pay taxes here. Our roots are here. We choose to be here.

Although we write about some positive things in our region every single week, we don’t subscribe to the asinine notion that anyone who points out the weak points of our community is somehow an enemy of the city’s tourism industry. Some of the wags and media sources in this city need to grow some self-esteem and just tell the whole truth if they truly want things to improve in the long term.

Things can get better, but they don’t get better by people just saying things are great. They’re improved by people helping other people, like Evelyn Mount, who won Best Volunteer. They are improved by people like Art Farley, Heather Lee Jones, and Gino and Juli Scala who opened, respectively, Brasserie St. James, Happy Happy Joy Joy, and Great Full Gardens Cafe. But these people, as do we all, stand on the shoulders of giants. We’d all be screwed if it hadn’t been for the pioneering innovators, the people and groups who’ve been around so long we don’t even remember them as groundbreaking—although the results of our poll shows they’re still on the cutting edge. We’re looking at you, Great Basin Brewing Co.

It was not that long ago when there was no Bruka Theatre to win Best Local Theater Company. In fact, if not for Scott Beers and crew in 1992, and those who followed, we wouldn’t even have a Best Local Theater category, because there was only one professional theater troupe, the Reno Little Theater.

Collaborative arts groups like Artown, Holland Project, The Generator, Valley Arts Research Institute, or Reno Artworks? In 1990, there were Sierra Arts Foundation and the Artists Co-op Gallery of Reno.

The concepts of collaborative and innovative work and living spaces like Reno Collective or Dozen at the Delux simply did not exist in Reno back in the day. Burning Man and the explosion of the creative class it provided to Reno was barely a dream. Practitioners of the local food movement, if there were any, were simply not a part of the mainstream discussion.

All this simply goes to show that those people who routinely underestimate what this community can do—does—are just pessimists. Yes, to take the reins of this community, people like those listed in our readers’ poll had to overcome 125 years of “vision,” but they’ve brought us all miles in the last couple of decades.

Those people who moan for Reno’s glory days ain’t seen nothing yet. We’re living in an age of wonders—and things are only going to get better.