Usually to ring in the New Year we go south into New Mexico and Indian Country...
but this year we celebrated the coming of 2014 at home and then the next day drove north into Utah and Mormon Country.
Meandering up through the familiar scenery around Moab...
we finally reached 1-70 and took it west and then at Green River followed the railroad and old Highway 6 up north again past Price where we took a detour around the old town of Helper....
and I was amazed that such a little town had so many old hotels. Situated at the mouth of Price Canyon since the early 1880's, Helper is a railroad/ mining town named for the "helper" engines that were needed to get the coal trains over the steep grade leading up to Soldier Summit. I guess many railroad worker and miner needed a place to stay, but also wonder if Helper, situated a little bit more than half the way from Salt Lake City and the outlaying setttlements such as Moab, Monticello, Bluff and Blanding, catered also to the Mormon traveler on their way to the Salt Lake Temple.
Continuing our journey,over Soldier Summit and past the wind turbine farm below on the other side, we popped out at Spanish Forks, where we headed north between the Wasatch Mountains to the west...
and the Great Salt Lake and Flats to the East to downtown Salt Lake City...
Now you are probably wondering why "Gentiles" would want to spend a weekend in Salt Lake City, where up to a few years ago was so vastly Mormon it was hard to find coffee or tea in any form, let a lone a good micro brewery and everything, except Temple Square was shut down tight on Sundays, yes it is open all day Sunday.
I remember passing through, when the girls were little, Jon being highly motivated to find his morning coffee. We drove around and around trying to find any place that had some caffeine and finally found a "Gentile" Auto Garage mechanic who shared his hot pot from behind the counter. Another time in the heat of the summer, I ordered ice tea off the fresh new menu and was told that the tea was actually coming, as in the whole set up of serving tea was coming but not there yet.
Guess what, things have changed, thanks hugely to the 2002 Winter Olympics that brought this city and the ski resorts above it to world wide attention and as of the 2010 census, Salt Lake is over 50% Gentile.
And now there is some pretty cool revitalization downtown, complete with a tram...
The Gateway Mall, built up around the old Union Pacific Train Yard and just a few blocks from Temple Square hosts some fantastic shopping, nice hotels, a great Mega-Plex movie theater and a Starbucks in the Clock Tower.
But since its establishment in 1847, when Brigham Young, the LDS colonizer and second president, upon seeing the Great Salt Lake basin, declared"This is the place", Salt Lake City was intended to be the capitol of a new nation, Zion...
A stark contrast to another old capitol, where streets in Santa Fe, made a Spanish Capitol in 1610, are barely wide enough for two burro carts to pass...
Salt Lake City was from the beginning a planned community, with extra wide streets...
and "awe" inspiring monuments like the Eagle Gate, which you pass under on your way down from the Capitol Building on State Street, where if you turn onto S Tempe you go past Brigham Young's grand residence, the Bee Hive House, which was being de-decorated while we were there, the holidays finally over...
and past the old Utah Hotel, now known as the Joseph Smith Memorial Building...
grand enough to be built in Washington D.C.
But in downtown Salt Lake the grandest of them all, is Temple Square.
Mormon or not, anyone interested in architecture and the history of how "the West was won", has to be impressed by the tenacity that it took to build the Temple...
and the Assembly Hall, built in 1880 with the left over stone from constructing the Temple...
Another beautiful fascade, around the corner from Temple Square on Main St. is the old ZCMI building....
Created in 1866, the Zion Cooperative Mercantile Institution's purpose was to either protect the Mormons from the price gouging of the Gentile merchants around them, or to drive out the competition that had come to make the Salt Lake basin their home as well. Which way it was is up to interpretation, but the original store still stands, an amazing example of Victorian architecture and has now been taken over by Macy's.
And the Mormon church is not out of the mercantile business, investing millions if not billions in a downtown revitalization where across the street from the old ZCMI, the new crowning jewel is the City Creek Center, upscale shopping complete with fountains and a constructed creek...
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But don't be fooled by Salt Lake's squeeky clean appearence, it still is a big city, with all the big city stuff, including almost getting my purse, cell phone and tablet ripped from my hands at the Gateway Mall, a man, complete with hoodie over his head and dark glasses, who abruptly changed course right near my shoulder, when at the bottom of an escalator, a mall security guard just happened to walk by. The reason I was carrying my purse, loose in my hand is because running back to the car alone, well with a kid in tow, I was also carrying my husband's very valuable work laptop, as in the family's source of income, secure in a backpack, I usually do carry my purse diagonal across me and zipped.
Well I spied the man, switched my purse to the other hand and then became a "Mamma" Bear and glared at him until he crossed over to the other side of the street.
But the thing I have learned about Salt Lake and the Four Corners, is where the "rubber band" is too tightly wound one direction, eventually, the extreme opposite comes to exist as well. Parts of Salt Lake City have a "hipster" and alternative vibe to them, none more than the Sugar House neighborhood, where on 15th and 15th there is an Eisenstein Bagel, Starbucks, contemporary gallery, a cool bookstore with a very contemporary and liberal clientele and surrounding the intersection, a neighborhood of renovated Arts and Craft style bungalows...
and an inordinate number of double entry "duplexes" or what we like to call "polygamy houses"...
for such a neighborhood built in the 1920's and 30's. Seen throughout the Mormon communities in the Four Corners, double entry houses or duplexes were a convenient layout for those following "the Principle" set forth by Joseph Smith and practiced until the church began excommunicating members for having more then one wife in the beginning of the 20th century.
For many things in Salt Lake, I am too liberal and to the left, for some other "new" ideas I am too conservative, but again that is what brings me again and again back to Utah. A place much like Jerusalem, The Salt Lake temple is aligned to the Holy City which was an inspiration to the founders the New Zion and like the Holy City, Salt Lake has always been and will always be city in conflict of culture and beliefs, in a place as inhospitable as the Holy Land.
