Urban Planning in the New American West: New Urbanism in Ogden and Salt Lake City, Utah, a photo essay
All photographs by Shane Waggoner copyright 2008.
I love the American West. One doesn’t have to be all that moved by Manifest Destiny to find the expansive horizons and craggy vistas of the Rocky Mountains exhiIarating.
I have family in Utah and Colorado. In the late eighteenth century the Waggoners came from England to the Southeastern states, migrated West through Tennessee, eventually becoming ranchers and cowboys in Texas. They ran cattle once a year from Texas to places in Utah and Colorado. So, when my father (descending, apparently, from a line of stragglers left behind in Utah) moved to Houston, Texas, in the ’sixties to attend college and married my mother, a native Texan, he didn’t realize that he was re-establishing part of the lost, Texan heritage of the Waggoners.
My father grew up in Ogden (mostly). As a child I spent summers there, but as an adult I never seemed to have a reason to return. Until this past summer. The tidy little mobile home with exquisite views of the Ben Lomond mountain range, where my dad’s sisters have lived for the last thirty years, was exactly as I remembered it. But some things have changed.
My strongest impressions from the trip to Ogden and Salt Lake City were the urban design efforts of the state since I was last there, almost twenty years ago.
There is of course the Utah that everyone who has never been there expects to find. As the historical hub of Mormonism Salt Lake City and Ogden each are home to elaborately Gothic and somewhat wrongly scaled temples.
Most of Utah remains very rural, and even its cities retain to this day the feel of a 1950s American town, altered only in minor ways from what my father remembers of it. The streets of Ogden seem like a place where you’d want to look for an ice cream store. Walking into Union Station is time travel. The old brick buildings that stand guard on the streets of Ogden, uniformly no more than four or five stories tall, have aged well while trying to stand their ground against development schemes that would too radically alter the cityscape.
I have a thing for trains. I drew them as a kid, and every family vacation involved my folks indulging me by taking us to the always-lame ‘train museum’. Train travel is so much more humane than plane travel, as I see it. And its integration into the fabric of cities, with street-accessible stations and railroad tracks and crossings, all of this urban paraphernalia is, to me, so much more friendly and intimate than the modern fortress that is the ‘airport’. Ogden’s train culture is vibrant and ubiquitous. And they are to be applauded for integrating a commuter line to Salt Lake City that makes perfect use of the old Union Station.
One of the things I like about trains these days is that by riding on them you are allowed access to the city’s suppressed side. Railways slice through industrial ghost towns, exposing the shells of defunct factories and the occasional construction equipment lot. There is no more ruthlessly intimate way to see a city, no more vulnerable posture for urban spaces than that which is afforded by the car of a fast-moving train. In Utah the train ride from Ogden to Salt Lake City is only comparable to those rides at Disneyland which put on display in the most artificial way some older era or some quaint European village. I suppose it’s the fact that the city’s rougher industrial textures, it’s steel and brick and machinery, have been sealed off into corridors visible only from the silent and fleeting vantage point of the express train.
From the train you can see the way things were. But things change, and you can see it so lucidly in Utah’s minipolises, perhaps because these towns have no clutter around them, just the empty expanse of terrain to the west, and the broad backdrop of the mountains to the east. You can see things there like you cannot elsewhere, and if you know how to read the landscape you can watch, as if in slow motion, a delayed struggle between a post-war manufacturing city and a new, tourist economy-based plan of growth.
Utah is now a case study in the ups and downs of the new urbanism that has been supplanting suburban flight since the ‘eighties. After dotting the foothills with the geometric footprints of middle class fear of urban spaces, i.e., crisp little suburban villages equipped with golf courses and temples, nostalgia has apparently kicked in. Utahans now want to reclaim the city centers, live in lofts, sip frothy things, and so on and so on. Thus, the revitalization of those great American downtowns.
‘Revitalization’ is probably not the right word. It implies bringing something to life. But Utah’s urban development model is more like cosmetic surgery. In these pictures you get a glimpse of the sometimes awkward and artificial transformation of the US West into centers of concentrated consumerism.
Utah is building itself up around the identity of outdoor sports (‘The World Plays Here’). In addition to the development of Snow basin (recent site of Olympic Games), I encountered a new megasports complex that replaced a mall in downtown Ogden. It has a Gold’s Gym, iFly (indoor skydiving), rock climbing, swimming and other things. Ogden is tapping into the outdoor sports industry in several ways, e.g., by trying to turn one of its ponds into a water-skiing attraction that will host televised races. And the list goes on.
In addition to the emphasis on outdoor sports, the most obvious sign of ‘revitalization’ is the transformation of many of those old factory buildings into high end lofts. There are loft districts adjacent to major shopping districts designed to replicate industrial-era cities, with period street lamps, stone building bases, and cobblestone sidewalks in places. Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square leads the way in historical regionalist efforts to create dense consumer activity in the Disney-like atmosphere of an older, somewhat European style town. Trolley Square has sidewalk cafes, but the cafe is a Starbucks. It has fountains and public spaces, but they are hemmed in by Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, and Barnes and Nobles. One feels a little like the city itself is a theme park; life imitating art.
The new urbanism has merits, and in particular it strikes me as an option preferable to the ugly and unsustainable suburbanism that dominated development strategies in Utah and elsewhere up through the ‘nineties. Cities facilitate walking, the sharing of spaces, the sharing of transportation, interaction, community, tolerance, and a sense of the public good. Utah’s new urbanism suffers so far from the kinds of problems that it has run into elsewhere. namely, urbanism in Utah has so far produced gentrified lofts and thematized shopping experiences. And neither of these really facilitates the things that cities can do to make our lives better.
As Ogden follows in Salt Lake City’s footsteps, steadily refacing its facades, making manufacturing centers into lofts and movie theaters. the more personal side of the city is pushed further into the recesses of it outer limits, where only by train, passing through, can one catch glimpses of the city in more comfortable times. Perhaps I’m too nostalgic for an era I didn’t live through but know only through its relics. But it seems like the important questions will have to do with how cities, as they are ‘revitalized’, can retain something of the texture and odor and intimacy they once did.
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