Siena Closed

UPDATE - 2:24 pm

Fellow blogger Mike McGonagle went down to the Siena a few minutes ago and made the following observations:

The first thing you notice is the crowds standing around the exits having a smoke or just chatting.  No real anger, just a sense of resignation and a reluctance to actually leave this one last time.  I talked to woman who had opened the Siena 9 years ago – she had just enough time to pack a couple boxes of things from her office (mugs, service certificates, a couple stuffed animals, an autographed picture) and get them out the door. All the employees leaving seemed to be taking a few small objects with them to remember their time at the Siena – a cook with a salad bowl holding the contents of his locker and a cherished fry pan, a woman with a vase of flowers.

The casino doors were chained shut from the inside with  yellow chain link and locks.  Casinos never expect to have to shut the doors, and don’t
have the right hardware to do so elegantly.  Signs were up telling the sports book customers that their tickets would be honored at any Cal Neva
book location.  The linen services was stripping the table cloths from the restaurants and hauling them away before they got locked in.

At 11:50, the closure notices started getting pasted up at the hotel entrance, then around the entire facility.  Siena wasn’t allowing press on the property, though all the TV stations had reporters on the street.  Security politely asked me to join them, and I melted into the stream of employees leaving their jobs for the final time.

Rumors started circulating this morning and last night on Facebook but now it's confirmed. Siena is indeed closing its doors today at noon with little to no notice to employees. There's no word yet on if the closure is permanent or not.

This puts a couple hundred more people out of work. I hope the closure is temporary, but as the property is headed into bankruptcy, it could end up being another Kings Inn, held up in court for years with no one being able to do anything with the property. It's a great property in an awesome location, with some decent venues.

Thanks to Oliver X booking venues there, some great music talent was routinely found at the Loft and Enoteca. The Siena had some of the best looking rooms downtown, decked out in Italian motif.

I hope the property owners don't let the Siena be tied up in bankruptcy court for years like the Kings Inn was.

It's been a long, controversial history for the Siena, you can click here for a full timeline.

The immediate ramifications of this closure are of course the couple hundred folks left without a job. The long term ramifications if the Siena remained closed would be a deterioration of the entire neighborhood. Let's hope someone buys the building, or it reopens, or some additional information is released regarding the closure.

 

 

Comments:

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Posted by: Justin - 10/21/2010 1:47:46 PM
Very sad indeed. I'm really starting to worry if downtown can/will ever recover fully and relive it's glory days (and I say this as one of it's biggest supporters). With the economy, indian gaming, and other myriad issues there is just so much that needs to be done for Reno to be a truly attractive tourist destination, and no money/financing to do it.

Posted by: Matt - 10/21/2010 3:59:44 PM
Just read the closing docs filed with the bankruptcy court, according to the filing, Siena could no longer pay their bills. To put it simply, they were BROKE, period. They didn't even have money to keep the lights on, the reason they closed the casino was because they thought they could free up some cash flow to put towards main operations, hotel, restaurants, electricity etc, while negotiations went on the merry way to work out a deal to get real money flowing back into the Siena again, well unfortunately closing the casino didn't help at all and the Siena ended up more broke than it did before closing the casino so the decision was made to just shut everything down until negotiations reach an end with this "one" investor, which, the filing says, is due by October 29 or the Siena will stay closed for a long time. NOW the good news is, if a deal can be reached with this one investor, the Siena will likely reopen in as many as a few weeks, maybe sooner. We'll just have to wait and see.

Posted by: Jason - 10/21/2010 5:09:05 PM
So who is the investor then?