I get off the bus on 2nd South in downtown Salt Lake City on a late Sunday afternoon, rainboots covered in dried mud. I turn north on State Street in search of City Creek, determined to see its actual flow before the snowstorm sets in later tonight. Though I’ve never actually seen City Creek, I press forward confidently, ignoring the multitude of signs telling me I must turn left for “City Creek.” These signs will not take me to an actual creek, but to an upscale shopping mall with a large, river-like fountain running through the middle of it. There are no signs telling me where to turn for mall’s namesake, a real creek that begins in the tops of the Wasatch Mountains.

I finally arrive at City Creek Park. However, there is no creek to be seen; it’s an empty, man-made riverbed, filled with mud, leaves, and some slimy green stuff. This gives me pause. According to my preliminary web research, this was supposed to be a site where a portion of City Creek had been daylit, or brought back to the surface after being entombed in an underground pipe for decades. Where is City Creek?

Along the path from the park to the mouth of City Creek Canyon, are no interpretive signs at City Creek Park to indicate to me what this empty riverbed is or its history. There are trees, benches, garbage cans, grass—a couple of manhole covers that read “CITY CREEK” on their surface. An eclectic assortment of old homes.

Trees line my path forward, grassy patches surrounding the muddy creek bed. I look down and see cobblestones, some of which say the names of animals, along with imprints of their tracks. Brush mouse, red squirrel, elk. Curiously, I can’t make out any tracks at all on the stones inscribed with birds’ names, like the house finch and Townsend’s solitaire. Like City Creek itself, traces of their presence are mysteriously absent.

At Memory Grove Park in the mouth of the canyon, I finally find City Creek itself. Much of the riverbed within the park is manmade, guiding the river’s flow into a pond with a grate that takes the flowing water underground. The creek is still flowing, alive even in February, but where is the water going, if not to the empty creek bed of the park below?

Plans to daylight City Creek are not a new conversation in Salt Lake City. After the flood of May 1983 sent a torrent of water down State Street—the very street I walked up to find City Creek Park—discussions of how to reconsider management have abounded from local government, citizens, and businesses [4]. However, no daylighting projects (other than the small token of City Creek Park, which apparently doesn’t run year-round) have actually been implemented. Many aspects of different plans seem to have been forgotten by the public over the years [5].

This is not necessarily a deterrent for the Seven Canyons Trust, a small, student-founded non-profit committed to eventually daylighting all of the entombed streams in the Salt Lake Valley via a 100-year plan (City Creek is one of several). Currently, a trail and creek daylighting combo project is in the planning stages, which will aim to daylight a portion of City Creek from Salt Lake’s Downtown (just barely on the east side of the I-15) through an old rail rite of passage all the way to the Jordan River. Along the creek, a paved trail for pedestrians and bikes would connect Salt Lake’s commercial downtown with the old industrial/residential/eclectic commercial west side, on the other side of the I-15 freeway.

I meet with Brian Tonetti, director and co-founder of the Seven Canyons Trust, in a small café near the university. Young and wearing a plaid shirt buttoned up to the top button, he sips on an Earl Grey tea as he talks about the undergraduate capstone project that became his full-time job last year.

Talking with Brian, I learn that City Creek’s current location is actually not too far from where it flowed in early settler days. We don’t have much pre-settler information about City Creek, but, when Latter-day Saint pioneers settled the Salt Lake Valley in the mid-1800s, City Creek had two branches that drained into the Jordan River. One of the original branches went directly west along today’s North Temple Drive, which is where the bulk of City Creek’s water currently runs in an underground culvert before joining the Jordan [4].

Historical records are unclear as to the original path of the second branch since settlers began diverting City Creek almost immediately for irrigation purposes, Brian tells me, but currently an overflow culvert branches off from the main North Temple culvert along the Folsom Corridor, the site of the proposed project [4]. This overflow culvert was built as a precautionary measure for future flooding, but Brian and the Seven Canyons Trust have a more inspiring vision for the water route.

Salt Lake City government already has approved plans to turn the Folsom Corridor into a public trail—Brian tells me that they’re hoping to finish the design for the trail this fall and complete construction in 2021-2022—but the daylighting aspect of the project is still in flux [4]. A recent feasibility study conducted by LimnoTech found two possible ways to daylight the creek along the trail route. First, it is possible to construct a creek bed on top of the existing overflow culvert, then directing water through both the culvert and the surface-level creek bed. The other option is to remove the culvert altogether and create an above-ground creek channel in its place. This second option would require a larger channel to ensure that there is sufficient capacity to mitigate flooding, which may require additional land acquisition on portions of the route [2].

Though there is no visible construction on this yet, I decide to visit the site of the proposed trail to orient myself spatially and culturally to the Folsom Corridor. My mom, my sister, and my dog escort me in our 2003 Subaru Outback to the front of Fisher Mansion. It’s a delectably old, somewhat rundown brownstone, a fitting setting for a murder mystery. The plaque on the mansion names Albert Fisher (whose stone initials are embossed in large font on the front of the house) as the first owner of the home and also the founder of Fisher Brewing Company. The mansion is nestled up close to the Jordan River, and an industrial park with stacks of large wooden crates lies on the other side of the river. The mansion has peeling paint combined with old brickwork and some curious chimneys with rounded tops and holes in the sides, and the fencing matches the spooky-old aesthetic. I roll down the window to take a picture, but Liesey, our 1-year-old, 60-pound rough collie, lunges into my lap first to stick her head out the window, giving me a face and mouth full of fur instead of a good picture of the mansion.

In contrast, the surrounding buildings include shiny offices and aged warehouses for Dominion Energy, Mark Steel, Questar, and the Gadsby Power Plant, the latter complete with 3 gigantic smokestacks that you can see from the Wasatch Foothills. Just south of the mansion is the I-80 freeway, constantly thundering with traffic.

Historic and modern, industrial and ecological, nature and culture—here, the lines between all of them are more like semi-permeable membranes than strict divides. The sound of the freeway is punctuated by birdsong coming from the trees over the Jordan. Walking along a stretch of the Jordan River Parkway Trail, we see railroad tracks pass over the river, we hear mechanical clanging from the inside of one of the Mark Steel warehouses and electric buzzing from a power substation. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a magpie hop down from the roof of a warehouse. I see at least three species of ducks in the Jordan River directly across from Gadsby, including a startlingly goose-sized American coot—the largest coot I’ve ever seen. The land at the beginning of this proposed trail and daylighting project is difficult to define and categorize, filled with an eclectic mixture of natural and cultural artifacts from across the past and present.

We get back in the car and drive the streets that are near the proposed trail and creek route. Folsom Avenue in 2020 is little more than a wide alleyway, lined by the back doors of Mexican restaurants, a tattoo parlor, and La Diana Market. According to Brian, the tracks from the old rail line that used to go through here were removed in 2008, and the overflow culvert was installed in 2010 [4]. Small, old houses are squeezed in between businesses like a car wash, Colby’s Tire (with signs out front reading “CAMBIOS DE ACEITE Y FRENOS” and “NO CREDIT NEEDED”), Roxy’s Beauty Salon (which appears to be a repurposed warehouse). Unlike some of the historic neighborhoods of Salt Lake City’s east side with their big, old trees, there are few trees or green spots on the west side of the I-15. We stop to let an old Union Pacific train pass, and Liesey throws herself into my lap again to take a look out the window.

Salt Lake City west of the freeway feels like an entirely different city from the east side. The east side has more access to transportation, more jobs, more white people, more parks, more government buildings. Notably, more expensive housing. The west side is more diverse, more industrial, more run down, and has significantly fewer urban green spaces, despite the presence of the Jordan River. It doesn’t take long to notice that Salt Lake’s west side gets significantly less attention and resources compared to its east side.

To learn more about the neighborhood where the Folsom Corridor Project is proposed—Poplar Grove—I chat with Nan Weber, a resident of Poplar Grove and a local research historian. She’s owned her house on Post Street since 1985, and her eyes light up as we chat about Poplar Grove history over coffee and pastries. She describes Poplar Grove as having many younger families and immigrant families who find the small older homes in the neighborhood to be good places to start out before finding a larger home somewhere else [5].

Nan has researched the history of the Poplar Grove neighborhood for years, and she tells me about the historic reconstruction of bridges over the Jordan River being in the same line of thought and impact as the Folsom Trail and City Creek daylighting project.

“The bridges seem important to me…when the Indiana Bridge started crumbling down, and they redid that bridge, it was a big deal for the neighborhood. Then, as the Jordan River Parkway started developing, all the footpaths that crossed the river became really important for us pedestrians that are using the neighborhood. So, the idea of daylighting the City Creek down to the Jordan kind of adds that same feel of being able to walk in nature in your own neighborhood without it being downtown”

— Nan Weber

One of the negative consequences that can come with green space and redevelopment, however, is gentrification. Wondering about how it might impact the young families and immigrants living in Poplar Grove, I ask Nan if she thinks that could be an issue here with the completion of the City Creek-Folsom Trail. She brings up mixed feelings about a recent purchase of the old Mark Steel site in Poplar Grove—the same industrial warehouse site I saw just across the river from Fisher Mansion—which has been rezoned with plans to develop it into a mixed-use residential area, potentially including multistory apartment buildings [1]. “Is the plan so different from the rest of the neighborhood right here that it’s not even going to be part of the neighborhood? Sometimes when I looked at that plan I’ve thought ‘wow, that’s really cool,’ but how does it relate to, you know, the rest of those little worker bees?” [5]. Nan refers to residents of Poplar Grove as “worker bees” because, historically, landowners and businesses like Fisher Brewery provided housing for their workers right on their own land in Poplar Grove. The working class has long lived in the neighborhood.

To learn more about redevelopment plans in the Poplar Grove area in general, I meet Nigel Swaby of the River District Chamber of Commerce in another downtown coffee shop. For Nigel, the primary appeal of the City Creek-Folsom Trail project is the amenities and redevelopment it could support in Poplar Grove and the neighborhood just north of it, Fairpark. The fact that we were meeting in a coffee shop downtown instead of on the westside was an undeniable demonstration of the lack of amenities in West Salt Lake City. According to both Nan and Nigel, there’s really only one coffee shop in Salt Lake’s westside—Mestizo Coffee. I had planned to meet each of them there for our interviews, but it was closed for President’s Day, so we had to scramble to find different cafes downtown.

The scarcity of amenities as simple as coffee shops is certainly an annoyance. “I shouldn’t have to go downtown,” Nigel says with an irritated smirk. “There should be more than one coffee shop over there. Cause I was looking for another one; I try and support businesses that are in the area. And they’re just hard to find” [6].

It’s even more than just an annoyance for Nigel; redevelopment and bringing amenities to the westside is also about making the neighborhood safer. I look to Nigel’s daughter, who is with us at our coffee table on a no-school day, looking rather bored (she must be around 5 or 6 years old). Thinking of the safety of his family as well as other families in the neighborhood, Nigel and the River District Chamber have been putting pressure on the city to redevelop the area for a while.

“The challenges [are that] you’ve got a bunch of nuisance crimes, you have minor property crimes, [and] within the last two years there’s been five murders that are in that area,” Nigel shares [6]. I ask Nigel to show me where the murders occurred, and they are all roughly within the same few blocks, centered around North Temple Drive and the I-15 freeway. These murders include the recent Mackenzie Lueck case, in which a University of Utah student went missing and was found dead several months ago.

Among the other crimes in the neighborhood (and in nearby neighborhoods like Fairpark and Rose Park), Nigel mentions prostitution rings and drug cartels [6]. From his depiction of the west side (which is where he grew up), I hardly recognized the neighborly Poplar Grove community rich with history as fondly described by Nan. I’m fascinated by how the same place can be described in such different ways by two long-time residents of the area.

Besides convenience and safety, redevelopment of Salt Lake’s west side could also help address issues with population growth. “We’re getting 60,000 people a year, just moving in from out of state,” Nigel emphasizes. “60,000 to the Wasatch Front—that’s the size of the city of Logan—every year, and that’s projected to keep growing until 2050. In Salt Lake County, we’re short almost 50,000 affordable housing units, and we’ve got about 10,000 units going up a year. So, you do the math—we’re on a treadmill that we’re never going to catch up on, unless communities are willing to accept density” [6]. When I ask him about gentrification, he describes it as a reality that is already happening and that is somewhat inevitable if we’re going to address these housing needs.

Where does the City Creek-Folsom Trail and daylighting project come into this? Nigel shares his vision: “In my mind, I envision ground floor restaurants and bars and maybe one or two levels of housing condos or apartments, almost a Bourbon Street type atmosphere with the open City Creek that people will walk down…There’s a project that’s atmosphere with the open City Creek that people will walk down…There’s a project that’s being discussed on 3rd North to…develop the complete streets concept that would have bike lanes and make it more walkable. So yeah, I can see this becoming a more well-thought-out 9 and 9 type neighborhood” [6].

Looking at the small houses crammed together, the gritty industrial and rail development, and the freeways nearby, it’s hard for me to imagine the creek and the restaurants and the apartments and bike lanes that Nigel describes. I remember my conversation with Nan from earlier when she talked about these redevelopment plans; the redevelopment sounds really nice in many ways, but how does it fit in with the current community? Will daylighting City Creek mean changing Poplar Grove forever? And, most importantly, will those changes end up making the neighborhood too expensive for its currents residents to continue living there? Considering Salt Lake’s housing shortages and rapidly rising property values, it’s definitely a possibility.

I decide to go to the place where North Temple Drive crosses over the Jordan River. There, the current confluence of City Creek and the Jordan River is completely unmarked, an unassuming brick rectangle letting a slow stream of water enter the Jordan’s flow.

As an outsider and as a white woman, I don’t pretend to have had the struggles that many of the demographics of Salt Lake’s west side experience regularly. But I believe in river trails. I grew up by the Sammamish River in western Washington State, walking along a public river trail nearly every single day. Despite our financial and familial troubles, we found respite by our river, moving through our pain, our fear, and our struggle in each step that we took with the Sammamish’s flow. The river trail was something that connected us with the natural world, with our more-than-human neighbors, with something bigger when we felt trapped or depressed. We need places like river trails “so we don’t disconnect from the things that give us life. They do give us life, the world that we’re a part of,” Nan agrees [5].

Having access to green space—even better, a river or creek, in my own biased view—can change a family’s life for the better. A space that can embrace the strange beauty of permeable boundaries, acknowledge the natural culture and cultural natures we are surrounded with in the city, a space that can heal and rejuvenate—what might that look like? The options for the future are filled with ambiguity and complexity, just like Poplar Grove itself, but I’m hopeful that the daylighting and trail project can bring some of this connection and joy to the residents of the neighborhood.

Anne Whitehouse is an Environmental Humanities MA student at the University of Utah. She completed her undergraduate degree in Biology at Brigham Young University. She strives to use writing to find ways to connect urban audiences with the natural world and ecosystems that we are all a part of. Her master’s thesis research examines the complicated and myriad relationships humans have with urban rivers through ecocritical analysis of Korean writing about the Cheonggye Stream in Seoul, South Korea. Originally from the Seattle area, she now lives in Provo, Utah with her family and her rough collie.

Sources

Salt Lake City, 1230 West 200 South Zoning Map Amendments (2018).
Lambert, Feasibility Analysis for Daylighting of City Creek in Folsom Corridor - Salt Lake County Watershed Symposium (2019).
Love, Daylighting Salt Lake’s City Creek: An Urban River Unentombed (2005).
Brian Tonetti Personal Interview (2020).
Nan Weber Personal Interview (2020).
Nigel Swaby Personal Interview (2020).

City Creek & Folsom Trail – Daylighting Our Natures & Cultures

Sources

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