Prospecting for Gold:
Nevadan Has Plans
For Old Mining Hotel

Mr. Roberts Hopes to Revive
Abandoned Desert Spot;
Getting a Proper Airport
By GEORGE ANDERS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 7, 2004; Page A1

GOLDFIELD, Nev. – Edgar S. "Red" Roberts has piloted helicopters, run cattle ranches, mined volcanic rock and developed shopping malls. He and his wife have several million dollars in a brokerage account at Morgan Stanley. At age 76, he doesn't need to work any more.

But one last project beckons. In the central Nevada desert, a vast, abandoned hotel sits alone. Frigid air blows through broken windows. An ancient grand piano from Imperial Germany adorns an empty dining room. A dead pigeon sullies the fourth-floor hallway. This is the Goldfield Hotel, completed in 1908 as a testament to a boom town's brief prosperity during the gold-mining frenzy.

Developers are pouring billions of dollars into hotel-casino projects in Las Vegas, more than 200 miles southeast of Goldfield. But ever since gold prospecting faded in the 1920s, so has the Goldfield Hotel. Though it stayed open through World War II on the custom of soldiers training nearby, no one can recall a paying guest since 1945. Goldfield has shrunk to a hamlet of just 356 people, down from 25,000 at its peak.

Mr. Roberts first encountered the Goldfield Hotel 50 years ago, when he and his mentor, Harvey Gross, were driving to Las Vegas. Mr. Gross ran a hotel and casino at south Lake Tahoe, and was looking for ways to expand.

"Each time, we'd go through Goldfield," Mr. Roberts recalls, "and Mr. Gross would point out the Goldfield Hotel. 'That's a well-built hotel, Red,' he'd say. 'A very well-built hotel.' "

Mr. Roberts was orphaned at age 7 in the 1930s when both his parents died in a Nevada car crash. He spent several unhappy years with a grandmother in Kansas, only to hitchhike back to Nevada when she died unexpectedly. He was 11 at the time, and he worked odd jobs along the way to raise money, seething that people wouldn't pay him properly "because I was so young."

Then his life brightened. In the early 1940s, he was informally adopted by Mr. Gross and his wife Llewellyn. The couple had founded a hotel and casino called Harvey's Wagon Wheel. As Mr. Roberts grew up, he started counting money in the casino, flying a helicopter for the Grosses and helping negotiate real-estate deals. He called Mrs. Gross "Mother." He admired Mr. Gross and worked as one of his right-hand men for more than two decades, before finally heading off on his own in the mid-1970s at age 47.

Today, there isn't much in Mr. Roberts's life to keep those memories alive. The Grosses died some time ago. Their rustic little hotel/casino has grown into two modern high rises that belong to Harrah 's Entertainment Inc. When Mr. Roberts drives by Lake Tahoe, it's hard to find a trace of the old days.

Mr. Roberts made his money chiefly in ranching, as well as some property development, and by fixing up a cruise ship that sailed off the coast of Mexico. Two summers ago, he showed up in Goldfield, where county auctioneers were hawking dozens of properties seized for nonpayment of taxes. When the Goldfield Hotel was offered for about $360,000, Mr. Roberts's hand shot up. He was the only bidder.

At least a half-dozen people have owned the Goldfield Hotel since World War II. Each has vowed to restore the building to its old splendor. All have failed.

The last man with big plans for the hotel was California developer Lester O'Shea. He spent $4 million in the 1980s trying to turn the hotel into an Edwardian-style tourist retreat. The project eventually collapsed in bankruptcy proceedings.

Mr. Roberts says he plans to spend $1 million on redeveloping the hotel, hoping to reopen it for travelers within the next few years. He intends to spend next year restoring only the bottom two floors, with a goal of opening a coffee shop, a small casino and about 40 guest rooms in 2006. The two top floors could wait until later, he says.

On a recent visit to the Goldfield Hotel, Mr. Roberts poked through a series of basement chambers until he found the control room for an old dumbwaiter. Then he grabbed an enormous crank and started tugging. "I don't think we can get this working again," he said. "But maybe we can cut a hole in the ceiling and let guests look down and see it."

Mr. Roberts vows to keep a tight rein on costs, even if it means leaving his spacious home near Carson City, Nev., and moving to Goldfield for months. "I'll live in my RV," he says.

He is urging county officials to build a proper airport, and he hopes a potential nuclear-waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 80 miles away, will bring in more truckers' business. Even some local mines might reopen.

Skeptics say it will be tough to make Goldfield into a tourist destination. Stuck midway between Las Vegas and Reno, Goldfield is more than 200 miles from the nearest sizable airport. It is reachable only by U.S. Highway 95, a two-lane road that is traveled mostly by long-haul truckers on tight budgets.

"This is where tumbleweeds come to die," says Angela Haag, a former Lake Tahoe restaurateur trying to convert an old Goldfield bank building into a bed and breakfast.

At times, Mr. Roberts acknowledges the tough odds against his hotel project. "It's a challenge," he says. "I may regret it." Driving home from Goldfield on a recent evening, he pointed out one boarded-up hamlet after another. "These towns are slowly dying," he said. "There used to be gas stations and motels here. Now they're just turning to dust."

On visits to Goldfield, Mr. Roberts mostly dawdles in the darkened spaces of a partial ghost town. There he remembers what it was like to be a young man in small-town Nevada more than a half-century ago.

Patrons at the town's main restaurant, the Mozart Café, bring out guitars in the evenings and sing country standards from generations ago. Mr. Roberts joins in for favorites like "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" and "Make the World Go Away." Long ago, he confides, he sang those songs at the Grosses' parties to entertain high-rolling gamblers.

Recently, Mr. Roberts wandered through darkened passages at the Goldfield Hotel, clutching a flashlight. In the lobby, he gawked at an 80-year-old telephone switchboard. It didn't work anymore, but that hardly mattered. Before long, Mr. Roberts began playing with red-and-tan phone jacks, plugging them into different parts of the console.

"We had one like this at Harvey's Wagon Wheel," he said. With a chuckle, he recalled the way that indignant wives in the 1940s kept phoning that resort, wanting to know where their husbands might be.

More memories came flooding back. When he was a teenager, Mr. Roberts said, he and Mrs. Gross tallied coins from their casino's slot machines. They would sit on beverage crates in a storeroom, gossiping and adding up the house's winnings. One would shovel coins into a manually cranked counting machine; the other would turn the handle. "I loved that," he said.