An excavator takes big bites out of the building at Eddy and Main streets on Monday morning. Photo special to The R-C by Erik Nilssen
Like Sharkey’s on the south side of Gardnerville’s Main Street, the building at Eddy and Main streets started out as a couple of separate but connected businesses.
On Monday, an excavator knocked down the structure after it was declared derelict by the county.
Unlike the former Gardnerville Laundry, the structure owned by a California company succumbed slightly more than a year after Gardnerville Town Board members voted to seek a code enforcement against it and the former bookstore up the street.
Unlike many of Douglas County’s oldest structures, the legacy of the former restaurant is a little vague.
According to county records, the structure was built in 1905 after the fire of 1904 burned down that section of Gardnerville. It may have housed the Gardnerville Post Office for a time when it was new.
In 2015, native Gardnerville resident Lura Morrison remembered that the structure included the Bamboo Hut and Joyland Café when she was a girl growing up in town.
The Bamboo Hut’s grand opening was May 29, 1947, after the bar was converted from Bee Jee’s Little Club, according to back issues of The Record-Courier. There was also a Union gas station at the corner.
Wallace Kwan operated the neighboring Joyland Café in the property for many years before retiring in 1979.
For nearly 20 years from 1979 to the late 1990s it was home to Magoo’s Pizzeria before it became the Bull’s Eye in 1999. By 2003, it was an antiques mall with a variety of sellers before it was sold in 2007.
The former home of Old Town Antiques hasn’t had a tenant since the property was sold in April 2007. Also on the property is the former Eddy Street Book Exchange, which moved to Minden more than a decade ago.
It has been eight years since Gardnerville underwent its last big makeover when the East Fork Hotel was torn down after being at the corner of Main Street and Gilman Avenue for nearly 120 years. Also taken down that year was the former Aladdin Florist, which housed the Pyrenees’ Basque Bar and Hotel.
