Postcard depicting the Moana Hot Springs Baths, from 1910, when the facility served as a training camp for heavyweight boxer Jim Jeffries prior to his bout with Jack Johnson.
Newcomers to Reno traveling on Moana Lane often wonder why there’s a street in the Biggest Little City named after the titular Hawaiian character from a recent Disney cartoon?
It turns out the street actually derived its name from a well-known hot springs complex that once stood on a lot at the corner of West Moana and Baker lanes and that resort was named after a famous Hawaiian resort-spa.
A metal Nevada-shaped historic marker on the former site of the hot springs provides some illumination. It notes that Reno’s Moana Hot Springs opened on Oct. 29, 1905, and boasted a large bath house with a pool fed by natural hot springs at the site as well as a hotel, clubhouse, baseball diamonds and lush picnic grounds.
The original owners, Charles T. Short, John N. Evans and Al North, had acquired a portion of the Haines Ranch in southwest Reno that sat on top of a geothermal belt running through that part of the Truckee Meadows. They promoted the warm waters in the pool as having healing, medicinal qualities.
After opening, Moana Hot Springs quickly became a popular local attraction. Within a short time, the owners added a dance hall, a lake for winter ice skating and summer boating and an outdoor pavilion.
In 1910, when Reno hosted the so-called “Fight of the Century” between world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson and his challenger, former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries, the latter chose the hot springs as his training site and hosted a series of boxing exhibitions with sparring partners in the lead-up to the main event.
Records show the site also hosted aerial exhibitions during the heyday of barnstorming airplane pilots and exotic animal shows. The name became so well-known that the owners sold bottled water and ginger ale made from its waters at off-site outlets.
In 1907, the Nevada Interurban Street Railway, the city of Reno’s electric trolley system, extended a three-mile line to the resort, linking it to the rest of the city.
As an aside, my late grandmother once told me that when she was a young girl she remembered it being a special treat to travel from her home in downtown Reno on the trolley out to Moana Hot Springs, which, she said, was so far out of town.
World War I and the relative softening of Reno’s tourism trade during the war caused the resort to lose business and, in about 1917, the owners sold it to Louis Berrum, owner of the trolley line.
Berrum’s company ran trolley service out to the resort until 1920, when it closed down all of its operations. The Berrum family, however, continued to operate the resort for the next four decades.
In 1927, fire destroyed the original pool house but it was rebuilt. Over the next decades, the hot springs gradually declined in popularity. In 1957, the city of Reno acquired the property, demolished all of the old buildings and, in 1960, built a functional covered pool and wooden baseball stadium on the site (which was home of the Reno Silver Sox and Reno Padres minor league teams for many years).
The Moana Pool provided recreational swimming for residents until 2007, when the city closed the facility, which was badly in need of rehabilitation. In 2012, it was demolished.
Today, municipal sports fields and a gravel lot stand on the site of the once-splendid resort. For several years, city officials have had plans to build a large, modern aquatics complex on the property once funding becomes available.
Rich Moreno writes about the places and people that make Nevada special.
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