What would you actually lose if Believe Plaza changed hands, and would you have known to ask before it happened?
For most of June 2026, that question sat at the center of a fight that outside observers might have filed under routine municipal business: a downtown venue proposing to lease a city-owned lot. Inside the Riverwalk District, it read differently. Residents who treat that patch of pavement as their actual town square spent a month explaining, in granular and specific terms, everything the plaza already does. The proposal collapsed on July 1. What it left behind is a clearer picture of how this neighborhood actually runs.
A Town Square Built From an Implosion
Believe Plaza sits on the footprint of the old Mapes Hotel, the downtown landmark the city imploded years before the plaza existed. What replaced it wasn't an accident. A 1995 Reno Redevelopment Agency report, "A Revitalization Strategy for the Downtown River Corridor," specifically called for that parcel to become an open public town square once the Mapes came down. Later planning documents, including the Virginia Street Placemaking study and the Truckee River Vision Plan, reinforced the same idea: public gatherings, art, music, street vendors, no fence.
That history mattered in June because it turned an abstract debate about a lease into a concrete argument about intent. The plaza wasn't leftover space waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it. It was designed, decades ago, to be exactly what it had become.
The Week Nobody Thought to Advertise
Part of what made the June proposal land badly is that Believe Plaza already has a full calendar, just not one printed anywhere official. Ask a Riverwalk regular what happens there in a normal week and the list comes fast:
- Tuesdays bring Bike Night and Family Soup Mutual Aid, a volunteer group that has served free soup on the plaza on a standing weekly basis
- Every third Saturday, the Riverwalk Merchants Association runs its Wine Walk alongside "Rush the River," the district's monthly market for local, handmade, and Nevada-made food and goods
- Summer brings Dancing on the River, staged at Believe Plaza as part of the citywide Artown festival
- The Fourth of July draws crowds large enough that locals describe the plaza's energy that night as the clearest proof of what the space is for
- Large-scale civic gatherings, from Women's Marches to No Kings protests to community memorials, have used the plaza as their default assembly point
None of that is hypothetical or aspirational. It's the plaza's actual attendance record, accumulated one Tuesday and one third Saturday at a time. That record is what residents reached for the moment someone proposed changing who runs the space.
The Pitch That Called It Blighted
On June 5, The Eddy, a Sierra Street venue that has operated in the Riverwalk District for roughly a decade, submitted a Letter of Intent to the City of Reno proposing to lease Believe Plaza and an adjacent redevelopment parcel for one dollar a year. Co-owners Kurt Stitser and Phil Buckheart framed it as an investment offer: a privately managed public space, modeled on arrangements like Millennium Park in Chicago and Bryant Park in New York, that would add a music venue, a playground, and more food trucks while keeping the plaza open to the public.
The proposal kept the Believe sculpture and the nearby Space Whale in place. It promised continued access to the Truckee River and uninterrupted use of the Tahoe-Pyramid Bike Path, which runs through the site. It also, in its own language, described the plaza as underused and under-invested, a characterization that read to many longtime users as calling a space they visit weekly "blighted."
The backlash was immediate. Residents and stakeholders said the announcement felt like it arrived without meaningful community input, despite touching one of downtown's most heavily used public spaces.
Thirty Days of Recusals and Setback Lines
What followed was less a policy debate than a month of scrutiny. Commenters flagged that the proposed site plan appeared to conflict with the city's riverfront setback requirements. Residents also pointed out that Stitser holds a seat on the same redevelopment advisory board that reviewed his own proposal, and while he recused himself from the vote, he had already presented his case to the colleagues who would ultimately decide it, then remained in the room before and after. Some residents cited Nevada's conflict of interest statute, NRS 281A.400, arguing the arrangement fell short of a clean recusal even if it satisfied the letter of the rule.
On June 27, The Eddy responded by launching a dedicated website addressing what it called "myths and facts" about the relocation, again pointing to Millennium Park and Bryant Park as precedent for privately managed public land. Two days later, Buckheart told local television that the plan represented "a really 180 from what was on social media" and reiterated that free speech access to the plaza would never be removed.
By that point the argument had moved well past logistics. Critics, including a widely read op-ed on This Is Reno, argued the deeper issue was a redevelopment culture that treats public land as vacant space waiting for a private fix, rather than recognizing that a plaza used every week for feeding people, gathering protesters, and hosting free concerts is already doing its job.
The Withdrawal, and What's Still on the Table
On July 1, Stitser formally withdrew the Letter of Intent, according to a City of Reno memorandum from City Manager Jackie Bryant. In a joint statement, Stitser and Buckheart said procedural and legal considerations had surfaced that needed to be resolved before the concept could move forward, and that they were stepping back from the plan in its current form.
The withdrawal wasn't a full retreat from the parcel. Bryant's memo noted that the adjacent Reno Redevelopment Agency lot, separate from Believe Plaza itself, isn't subject to the same code restrictions that tripped up the original proposal. Stitser retains the ability to submit a revised Letter of Intent for that neighboring site, which would then route through the Redevelopment Agency Advisory Board for another round of review.
What the Near-Miss Actually Proved
The most useful outcome of the whole episode wasn't the withdrawal itself. It was what the fight forced into the open: a full, specific inventory of what Believe Plaza does, item by item, that nobody had bothered to write down until someone threatened to change who controls it.
That's the detail worth carrying forward if you spend time in this neighborhood. The plaza's value was never abstract civic goodwill. It was Tuesday soup lines, third Saturday wine walks, Fourth of July crowds loud enough to be remembered months later, and a bike path that runs straight through the middle of it. A private operator promising to preserve all of that would still be promising to preserve a use pattern that residents had already built for free, on their own schedule, for years. The plaza didn't need saving from neglect. It needed to stay exactly as unmanaged as it already was.
If you're weighing what it actually means to live near downtown Reno's river corridor, this is the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a listing description. A neighborhood where residents can name, from memory, everything a public plaza does in an ordinary week is a neighborhood with a real civic pulse, not just a walkable address.
If you're considering a move to the Riverwalk District, Midtown, or another corner of Reno and want a guide who pays this close attention to the details that actually shape daily life here, Tiffany Billman would love to hear from you. Let's Connect.
