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In 1984, with the advice of his father ringing in his ears, Brad Nelson uprooted his wife and two children from their Denver home and moved them to Henderson, Nevada, where he would begin a new adventure in shaping the new master-planned community of Green Valley with Mark Fine and American Nevada Corporation (ANC). Nelson, lifelong Nebraskan and only child of his parents, arrived armed with a Bachelor's degree in landscape architecture with urban planning option, a Master's degree in urban planning, and fifteen years of planning and executive experience with the national firm of Harmon, O'Donnell and Henniger Planning Consultants. He arrived in time to plan Green Valley's first village, the Village of Silver Spring. By the time he left ANC for Lake Las Vegas in 1999, his work was done and most large parcels had been sold. As Nelson puts it, by 1999 ANC was "out of land, and I'm a land guy." Lake Las Vegas had plenty of undeveloped land, so "land guy" Nelson a chief operating officer
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Anna Peltier, owner and founder of ARIA Landscape Architecture in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a transplanted farm girl and a musician. She was born in 1978 on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in Escanaba, Michigan, where she and two brothers were the second generation to grow up on their parents’ (and formerly their grandparents’) farm. She studied music performance at Michigan State University but after discovering her love of landscape architecture early in her college career, she changed majors and earned her degree in landscape architecture. Moving to Las Vegas in 2007, she first worked for JW Zunino Landscape Architects. While with Zunino she did design work for Lorenzi Park and designed the award-winning Cactus Avenue Interchange. As ARIA’s principal designer, Anna designed Discovery Park in Pahrump, Nevada, and the USA Parkway between Lake Tahoe, California, and Reno, Nevada. In 2013, when Anna opened ARIA, she carefully chose the name of her business. First, for practical reasons she want
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On March 11, 1978, Sosuke Miyazawa interviewed Nanyu Tomiyasu (b. May 28, 1918 in Las Vegas, Nevada) about his family’s farm and their legacy as one of the pioneering families of the city. Tomiyasu begins by talking about what brought his family to Las Vegas, the city’s abundant water reservoir and his father’s farm. In particular, Tomiyasu discusses his father’s experiments with farming as one of the city’s early farmers, the transition into nursery farming and Japanese gardens. Moreover, he discusses his siblings, the local schools, their great quality, the successful students the city produced and the growth of school populations. Tomiyasu describes the large Japanese population and the Union Pacific Railroad that many of them worked on. He ends by discussing the change in architecture within the city, such as where old buildings stood and what they are used for now, the first Episcopal Church and the old Mormon Fort.
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