This Place in Truckee May Be the Last of the Legends
A pair of storied properties hit the market over the last couple weeks in North Lake Tahoe. Are they the last of the unspoiled?
It was mid-December 2019, now commonly referred to around these parts as The End of The Before Times or the Last Christmas; I was up at Lake Tahoe.
All was quiet. There’s always a gathering-of-storm-clouds energy in the Tahoe Basin starting around December 12. Every restaurant and bar is back to full staff. The grocery stores are packed with booze and packaged dinners. The ski lifts are turning. There are extra tires, and flares, and chains on display in the gas stations. But there are no people. Not yet.
For that brief moment, you’ve got the run of the place, and for many who are non-civilians, it’s the last of the locals’ time to hit reset and gird for the onslaught. On weeknights, most of the restaurants still participate in the shoulder season two-for-one entree specials. Out on the trails or in the lift lines, you still see familiar faces. In less than ten days’ time, that will all be gone.
What comes next? Endless traffic, c-suite bros yelling weird work directives that are more like fortune cookie buzzwordspeak onto their mobile phones, glass-eyed children in puffy jackets, photo-op ready, left alone somewhere on their devices. Moms with frozen make-up faces trying to hold it the fuck together.
In their Land Rovers and Mercedes SUVs they come in threes and fours (or more!) Shiny, glorious people, recently released from the hermetically sealed boxes, their over-processed and curated homes—up out into the wild.
One or two over the fortnight between Christmas and New Years will even venture out of bounds at one of the ski resorts and die. He’s always between 39 and 43. Some content manager at a company with a name like Trunility. Loving father, caring husband, you know the drill. A blood sacrifice for these near woods. Sweet justice.
It was our second-to-last night there (the last night reserved for packing up our stuff and having that Sunday Scaries feels x10), and we decided to go to Lanza’s in Tahoe Vista for a drink in the wood-paneled bar, and some chicken parmesan split three ways.
We stopped at the Tahoe Biltmore on the way back to see what’s what.
The Biltmore is a three-quarter-century-old hotel-casino that sits tauntingly on the other side of the Nevada border from California’s Brockway Summit. Contrary to its name, evoking a nice(ish) hotel brand, the Bilty has decidedly always been a dive, at least in my lifetime anyway.
Whereas its across-the-way neighbor Cal-Neva had the lakefront cottages and the legendary ring-a-ding pedigree with Sinatra as part-owner and JFK and Marilyn as patrons in its swift-but-decisive early ‘60s heyday, the Biltmore’s always been a stumble into and crawl out of joint.
Home of the $1.99 breakfast, you could always be a little down on your luck at the Biltmore and come out no worse for wear. Hundred-dollar table maximums and single-deck blackjack both act as governors for the degenerate inside all of us.
But even in its divey glory—as perma-host of an annual locals’ only beerfest in the fall, and temporary home to many a coked-up Halloween party crew who’d go watch Bay Area ‘80s cover band Tainted Love across the street at the Crystal Bay club then pile thirteen deep into one of the hotel’s green-carpeted suites as not to risk getting pulled over and asked THE question by the CHP on the way home to Tahoe City, “How much have you had to drink tonight?”—the Biltmore had seen better days.
This was largely due to the current ownership, a man by the name Roger Wittenberg, an OG used goods recycler tycoon. Wittenberg made millions starting and flipping companies that took old things and created something new.
In the ’80s it was converting scrap metal into parts for knitting machines. Shortly after, it was taking bakery discards and turning them into poultry feed. His last venture, the one where he hit the jackpot, was turning discarded plastic bags (more than a billion a year) and combining them with sawdust to form composite decking called Trex.
Wittenberg’s company was bought out by ExxonMobil in the early ‘90s, and he stayed on the board. But after the fossil fuels giant got rid of their plastics division, Wittenberg and a trio of former Mobil execs bought the company back.
Today, Trex is still public and continues to trade around $100 a share. Though Wittenberg has long since stepped down from the board, retired, and moved to Incline to pursue other interests (mostly as a small developer), the company continues to grow as the largest re-user of plastics in the US.
In 2007, Wittenberg purchased the Biltmore for $28.4 million and started the Boulder Bay Company, which would set out to “redefine” the modest Northern Lake Tahoe stateline with a “new kind of resort.”
I covered, extensively, Boulder Bay’s plans from ‘07-’11, and while I was (and always will be) a scummy Biltmore purist, Wittenberg’s heart was seemingly in the right place.
The redevelopment not only made necessary, if not long overdue, improvements to the watershed in accordance with TRPA (the bi-state governing agency over Lake Tahoe, especially when it comes to all manner of development), but it also downplayed the corridor as a money drop for the haggard. Instead it proposed turning about two-thirds of the Biltmore parcel into public space while the buildable footprint run on renewable energy.
The original hotel would be remodeled, and condos for timeshares, single-family homes, and a conference space would be added, all LEED platinum-certified and blah blah blah.
There was an affordable housing complaint (which is more of a token check the box maneuver) and a nice biofuels public transit aspect to offset limited parking, which drew the concern of people who loved their SUVs: I thought that, among other things, was a good sign.
It was not a modest project by any stretch, and the team of Wittenberg’s attorneys, consultants, environmentalist/land-use activists, architects, and PR flacks grew seemingly week over week.
While a scaled-back version of the redo was eventually approved in 2012, by then, old Roger had run out of patience, and investors began to back off. While the end goal was to make money, overall, it was—at least on the surface—taking something in disrepair and making it better. And the North Shore was worse for it never breaking ground.
The prospect of renewal vanquished, the years to come turned miserable for the old Bilty.
Walking into the old gal that cold December night after dinner was a trip back in time. A pair of blackjack dealers were sitting at their stations, smoking cigarettes, talking to one another.
I sat down and played a few hands with my $40 bankroll. At one point, I had a fourteen, and the dealer showed an eight. “Double down,’ she said in a thick Eastern Bloc accent. “You’ve got eighteen,” I protested. She looked at me sternly as I extracted another $5 chip from the stack. She turned my card face down, flipped hers over to reveal a seven. She hit and busted. She flipped mine over, a seven. Twenty-one. “Nice hit,’ she said, deadpan, handing over a pair of red chips. I pushed one back in her direction. “Thank you,” she nodded in her icy monotone.
A cocktail server limped over. She was not a day shy of fifty-eight and had a big knee brace on her left leg over her black tights. “Want anything?” She smacked. “No thanks.” She paused, and set a napkin down, and waited. “Ok, I’ll have a Coke.” She returned five minutes later with a Bud Light. I gave her a red chip too.
So it went for about an hour. I got up to $75 and down to $20 before ending up at $50. Three Bud Lights later (the old school bottles with the label that peeled off) I pushed a pair of red chips at the dealer for the effort and rode away even. Pretty standard night for the Bilty, I surmised. No actual money had changed hands, and an OK (if not a little sad) time was had by all.
Records at the Washoe County Recorder’s Office show a Newport Beach-based real estate firm called EKN Development Group bought the place off Wittenberg last week. He and his daughter Heather Bacon, who up until a few days ago served as the hotel’s absentee GM, will split a cool $30 million for the decade-plus of effort as EKN plunked down a reported $56.8 million for the 110-room hotel, casino, restaurant, and 15-acre site.
Most of EKN’s portfolio is those disposable-looking roadside Southern California “executive” hotels that just smell like industrial cleaner and hand sanitizer looking at them. All with the contemporary sheen that resembles a soon-to-be discarded can of hard seltzer. For the amount of property and its location—especially in light of what’s happened to Tahoe Basin real estate over the last 18 months—just under $60 million feels like a bargain.
I would say maybe the joint will get a long-overdue restoration, and little life breathed into it, but I know that’s not going to happen. If anything, they’re looking at this as a tear-down; bring in the chemically-infused cabinetry, the laminate flooring, the granite, and the subway tile. Out with the wood-shingled roof, the mangy green and red carpeting, and the endless hallways filled with get-along ghosts.
I, for one, will miss the Trex decking guy. A man whose ultimate upcycling project never saw the light of day.
Rue Hilltop Truckee, CA 96161
The Great Ski Race is North Lake Tahoe’s annual dirtbag-meets-elite athletes fundraiser for the Tahoe Nordic Search & Rescue Team.
Every first Saturday in March, hundreds line up just outside Tahoe City in cross country skis and snowshoes to traverse (when there’s enough snow anyway) 26 kilometers and an almost a 2,000-foot climb (starting at 6.500 feet) up and over the “Fiberboard Freeway”—an old logging road frequented mainly by hikers, mountain bikers, and the occasional bro who’s had a few too many in Truckee and a truck that can get him back to Tahoe City in one piece.
The race features costumed folks with twelve-packs of PBR slung over their shoulder Chewbacca-style and the likes of 2x winter Olympian (cross country skiing) and one-time summer Olympian (mountain biking) Katerina Nash on the elite side of the spectrum.
The course, mostly downhill after a mountain peak soup station about 10k in, ends with a rush atop one of North Lake Tahoe’s original downhill ski runs, where participants like yours truly are encouraged by onlookers to “send it” down to the race’s finish where endless beer and the rhythms of ‘90s house music await—an intoxicating mix for someone who’s been running it in the red for the past couple hours.
Legs wobbly like Bambi, you point it toward the low-slung roofline of the Cottonwood restaurant and tumble down the permafrost till someone hands you a frothy pale ale or foamy cup of hot cocoa—whatever your poison—heaven on ice.
Why bring up the Great Ski Race? The Cottonwood, otherwise known as the restaurant where you can go dance all night on the tabletops to Cotton Eye Joe in your sweaty ski gear once a year, and its greater footprint is currently on the market.
Last purchased for just under $2 million in 2015 by Kathie Kearley-Green and her husband, Robert Green—who by their admission were part-time residents—the couple stands to make at least quadruple their investment back after six years. The property hit the market last week for an asking price of $12 million (Ok, $11,995,000 they’re using gas station pricing to lure in prospects, apparently.)
The sprawling acreage overlooks downtown Truckee and, along with being the jump-off for the best post-race party in the Basin, it’s being marketed as a “Downtown mixed-use” development site. So yeah. You can be sure they’re not trying to appeal to the mom-’n-pop bar owners here.
If not for the fact that this almost 50 acres abutting Forest Service land is pristine and costs approximately one-third of a lakefront home in Crystal Bay, I’d say it is out of reach for many.
Pool your money and turn it into a commune that provides housing, healthcare, daycare ...and all the soup you can drink and all the dancing you can do. In this time of housing crisis in the Basin why the heck not? We’ve tried everything else.