Frisch plaque stolen

Two plaques bolted onto the Riverside Bridge on Booth Street have been pried out and stolen.

The first bridge at the location was constructed in 1920. The plaque installed on that bridge carried the list of county and city officials who were in office when it was constructed, along with the name of the contractor, J.L. Hoffman of Minden, and a consulting engineer, C.P. Hill of Reno.

When the bridge was replaced in 1993, a member of the Reno City Council sought assurances that the 73-year-old plaque would be mounted on the new bridge, and it was installed on the east side. Now it is gone.

The plaque marking the new bridge was installed on the west side and it, too, is missing.

When the News & Review contacted the city to report the 1920 plaque was gone, city official Erich Strunge consulted old Google street level images and was able to determine the plaques disappeared between Google images from 2007 and 2011.

Among the 13 names that appeared on the 1920 plaque was that of Reno City Councilmember Roy Frisch, a bank teller who—on the eve of his federal fraud trial testimony against two Reno mobsters—vanished and was never seen again. FBI officials believed Frisch was abducted and murdered on March 22, 1934, by gangsters Lester “Baby Face Nelson” Gillis and John Paul Chase (“Public enemies in Reno,” RN&R, July 9, 2009).

“We will continue to obtain information and look at recreating and re-installing the plaques at some point in the future,” Strunge said in an email message.