North Salt Lake - the city between here and there...

For one of my classes this year I had to reflect on my childhood hometown - which I chose to be North Salt Lake City. We were to evaluate it based on many things like how we felt about our childhood hometown, memories we have, mobility, feelings of safety, what icons and image the city had. We were to look at whether or not the city had a sense of place, or a sense of entry and arrival. Finally we were to look at any importance in city planning in embracing the community identity that we could identify or suggest. This is the result. Since most of you that read this are my family which joined me in NSL - I'd love to hear your thoughts on the same matter...

Most of my childhood was spent in North Salt Lake City where I lived from fourth grade to graduation from High School with only a couple disruptions as my family moved around a lot. North Salt Lake is a community of about 13,000 people sitting just North of Salt Lake City, Utah. I have a lot of special feelings and memories about growing up in my hometown, however I am not sure they have a lot to do with the area, or the city, but more of just the circumstances of my youth.

I really don’t think I had a lot of conscience thoughts about my hometown while growing up. I felt it to be a safe and quiet community. It was very neighborhood based and very much based on LDS wards to differentiate social groups. As a child I was not active LDS and therefore felt quite a bit of isolation. Being a very suburban-bedroom community there was not a lot of social and public space and activity outside of the dominant religious institution. The city didn’t find it necessary to push for more multi-cultural facilities because so much of the community was already served by the dominant social coordinator – the LDS church.

There was no real business core or places for kids to “hang out.” In fact it could be argued creating kid-friendly hang out places was essentially discouraged worrying that it would bring more trouble than good. The main intersection of the community was two gas stations and the city hall, one gas station was tied to a strip mall with a smattering of businesses such as tax assistance and dry cleaning. Another intersection one block away which was tied to another strip mall that was constantly changing it’s make-up of stores with the exception of a locally owned drug store. There was a large park that was used for little league and soccer, but as I got older a dispute between the leagues and the concession eliminated its use for those purposes and it has sat practically empty since then.

I do have memories of walking to the local grocery store and getting together with friends in neighboring cities, but never in my own city. It is odd how empty my hometown feels the more I reflect on it for the purposes of this paper. Concerning mobility in the community if you didn’t have a bike when younger, or a car as you got older there was nowhere to go. The city was mostly perched on the hillside and it made it difficult for walking, biking, skateboarding, or those kinds of mobility devices. I remember times when I moved away from home to other states and came back without a car. I felt so trapped at my parents’ home unable to leave anywhere because an outing by walking would be a multi-hour trip anywhere worth going.

There are no real icons for the community in fact most people respond to “North Salt Lake” as “the place with the refineries?” While that icon is nothing to be positive about the city scrambled for years to find something else to give it identity. Their solution, I believe, was a large golf course at the top of the hillside surrounded by nice homes. The golf course has yet to make money as far as I know and it is most certainly not used by a large number of community members who don’t golf. I think the most use it gets is a 4th of July celebration every year on the 3rd of July. It suffers from being a city stuck between Salt Lake City, the largest city in the State, and Bountiful the 14th most populous city in the State. Being the 44th largest it can’t quite compete with what the neighboring communities can offer and has always suffered with an identity crisis.

Concerning a sense of entry with my hometown, the ironic thing is that is one of the things that have changed the most from what I can remember. They have placed and replaced a sign saying when you enter the city over and over. They have changed the sign and the logo and even toyed with giving the city a new name to try and give it more identity. They created a needless round-a-bout with an electronic welcoming sign in the middle to make the entry more clear and beautified. They placed it on the entry to the residential area instead of Highway 89, the major road in the city, to give it more of a pleasant bedroom community identity rather than the often sporadic corrugated metal pre-built and/or strip mall business community on Highway 89. They also have the sign sitting way back further than the actual beginning of the city. When traveling North you apparently now travel through the nether regions between Salt Lake City and North Salt Lake City that is the refinery land and gravel pit land. I think a large piece of it is technically North Salt Lake City but they have set the sign back far enough to let people think it is not the city with the refineries.

I think planning and community identity would be extremely important in a place like North Salt Lake or anywhere. Since the organic construction of the town has done more harm than good I am sure the city could benefit from the creation or the embodiment of its identity through some central planning. The city has long been associated with orchards that used to be throughout the area. Many things are named after those orchards like Orchard Drive and Orchard elementary but those Orchards are a thing of the past which has not been reused to create identity for the area. The city has suffered economically and so many who have been brave enough to try and open a locally owned business in any of these small strip malls have gone under. No chains come into the area, not because they aren’t wanted, but because they are smart enough to know there is no viability for it. Community identity would be so essential in city planning of North Salt Lake because it would essentially CREATE the community identity.

I think a recommendation I would give to North Salt Lake City to give it some identity is to redevelop a section of the city, ideally centrally located, in the heart of the town. Make a downtown that the community can be proud of. There are two obvious intersections that would suffice. Center Street and Orchard or Center Street and Highway 89. Orchard would be more ideal in that it is a calmer street and is close to the elementary school and some business community already established, including the bowling alley and the locally owned icon of Orchard Drug. I think developing this area into a dense walkable community would give a strong sense of “downtown North Salt Lake.” It would make a draw that would help bolster the businesses that struggle there already. It would give a space for the community to come together that isn’t a golf course or an empty park sitting by I-15. The city is lucky in that it is so close to downtown Salt Lake City and should take advantage of that fact. It is far enough away that it can be the quiet community that many seek, but close enough that it can take advantage of its culture and arts. A public transportation system of sorts would also benefit the area as there is no public transportation that goes East and West. It only runs North and South which is the smallest area of the city. A trolley or bus that went up the hill at good intervals would bring people to the downtown core and bring that area and community to life. Unfortunately I guess that depends on whether or not you can sell such a major redevelopment to the community. One that seems to be perfectly happy being stuck between Salt Lake and Bountiful with no identity to speak of.