edible traditions
HISTORIC URBAN GARDENS
Local food grew bountifully in Reno’s core.
WRITTEN BY JEN A. HUNTLEY
PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DEPARTMENT
Reno’s local food renaissance has many residents celebrating autumn with a bounty of their own produce, visiting local farms, or reveling in the harvest baskets from local community-supported agriculture programs. While many of us recognize that local food is a revival of much older patterns of feeding ourselves, we may not realize the historic geographies of food that underlay our current urbanscape.
One hundred years ago, horticulture was considered a low-status occupation. So, in many parts of the world and certainly in the American West, it was left to recent immigrants to make their way by providing communities with fresh fruits and vegetables. Most of Reno’s original subdivisions included deep lots, so families could grow their own food, and many operated small-scale “truck gardens” out of those lots to sell to local residents and businesses.
It still is possible to visualize both the inner-city truck gardens and the larger farms that included fruit orchards as one travels west along Riverside Drive and on to Idlewild. Remnants of those old apple orchards grace many of the yards in the neighborhoods between Mayberry Drive and the Truckee River. Immediately west of downtown, the recently recognized Powning’s Addition neighborhood was once an important food source for Reno. Where there are now parking lots and outbuildings for professional offices, a thriving community of Italian and Portuguese immigrants raised green beans and Roma tomatoes for themselves and the local market.
It wasn’t intended to be that way. Nevada State Journal editor Christopher Columbus Powning developed the neighborhood between Arlington and Keystone avenues in the 1880s to attract upper-middle-class professionals to what he liked to call “the Paris of the West.” But his vision failed to attract the desired clientele. It might have been the combination of wood-pulp sludge from upstream box mills, annual fish spawns, and sewage flowing down the Truckee that lowered real estate values in that neighborhood. By the first decade of the 20th century, the immigrant gardens had taken root.
Jen A. Huntley is professor of humanities at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, and author of The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origin of America’s Most Popular National Park.
