Goodbye, Sugar House
Salt Lake City’s funkiest neighborhood may fall victim to its own success.
by Ted McDonough
On the second floor of a brick building on 2100 South, Dottie Miles and son Chris share studio space in a one-time furniture store now chock full of artists. On the street outside, a man styles hair from inside a small glass cube. Window shoppers pass by an antique store and lingerie shop on their way to a coffee shop at the main intersection of Sugar House at 2100 South and Highland Drive.
The Sugar House business district, with its turn-of the-century brick buildings and 1960s-era shopping centers, has been preserved by poverty and by residents set against a modern world of big-box superstores. It’s the only place in Salt Lake City where you can get an Italian meal, haircut, oxygen treatment and vintage clothing—all within a short walk.
In serious decline a decade ago, Sugar House underwent a renaissance in the late ’90s. On the main drag today, there isn’t a vacant storefront in sight and, on weekends at least, the area draws lots of foot traffic. Long offbeat, Sugar House is now popular, and its newly valuable real estate has attracted attention from developers.
Red Mountain Retail Group, a Santa Ana, Calif. company that owns 70 shopping centers in seven states, is currently working with owners on half of the block most people think about when they think of Sugar House. Called Granite Block, after the Granite Furniture store, it’s the block marked by a commemorative obelisk at the southwest corner of 2100 South and Highland Drive.
From inside his Herbs for Health store, Devin Anderson looks wistfully across Highland Drive at a large wall of brick and opaque windows that forms the backside of Wild Oats, part of a mall development of chain stores built eight years ago with help of a $2 million tax rebate given by the Salt Lake City Council.
“That is Rodeo Drive, and this is kind of Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco,” Anderson said comparing the two sides of the street. “Eventually, this will be Rodeo Drive, too.”
As is the case with many Sugar House small-business owners, Anderson is resigned to moving in a few years. The area and the shoppers it attracts have become too valuable to last much longer. Small, local businesses gather here because the rent is cheap. Most storekeepers near Anderson pay less than $1.50 per square foot for small spaces. Across the street, a square foot at the Commons at Sugar House mall goes for around $30, and the shops and restaurants are nearly all national chains.
Through the 1990s, Sugar House residents lost battle after battle to preserve the outlying areas from invasion of the large stores that cater to car traffic with large parking lots. Now, development is coming to the block of older storefronts many see as the heart of the town square. If Granite Block goes corporate, many fear the battle to keep Sugar House’s old-time Main Street feel will be lost for good.
The Granite Furniture property that Red Mountain plans on developing is comprised mostly of furniture warehouses and parking lots. Causing more consternation is the question of what will become of the block’s east end, home to most of Sugar House’s quirky, small businesses. Craig Mecham, who owns the land, has drawn up preliminary development plans. While city officials hope all of the block’s landowners can come together on a collaborative design, so far, each is working independently.
“The people that live here don’t want it to become another mall with the label Sugar House slapped across it,” said Mark Holland, chairman of the Sugar House Community Council, a residents group that spent several years helping city planners create a 2001 plan for Sugar House.
That city master plan calls for retaining the small scale of stores on 2100 South and Highland Drive and setting aside space for small, local businesses. Developments are to be designed with pedestrians in mind. That means windows along the street and buildings that abut streets with parking lots hidden behind.
It sounds good on paper, but the plan hasn’t stuck. The community council has fought developers for more than a decade and, almost always, they’ve lost.
In 2001, Walgreens sued after the Salt Lake City Council put a moratorium on plans for a boxy drive-through pharmacy. In the end, the city compromised, allowing a street-side parking lot in exchange for larger windows. A similar story played out four years later when Smith’s Food & Drug rebuilt its 900 East store. Negotiations prevailed over the master plan and the parking lot went street-side.
Romancing the Wasteland
Some would-be developers simply can’t understand what the fuss is about. Sugar House is run-down, and the buildings proposed for development are not worth saving, they say. While the master plan calls for preserving the facades of older storefronts on 2100 South and Highland Drive, they’ll likely be torn down. All the valuable old architecture is already gone, and the early-1900s buildings that remain on Highland Drive have been remodeled so often that only their steel skeletons are left on lower floors, said Jack Hammond, an architect with Salt Lake City-based Architectural Nexus, the firm employed by Mecham.
It isn’t just the building’s facades that will go. The landlord of the stores that give Sugar House its edge doesn’t want them there.
“It’s easy to romanticize some of the other businesses,” said Julie Berreth, an architect working with Mecham, recently told the Salt Lake City Council. Several of the stores, she said, “you wouldn’t take your kids in if you were paid to do so.”
She didn’t say which stores. Maybe Blue Boutique, which takes up much of the 2100 South stretch with windows displaying busty, barely clothed mannequins, maybe the shop that sells local art alongside hemp products and hand-blown glass pipes or maybe the “fashion forward” men’s clothing store boasting window displays reminiscent of the Village People, and a shop in its basement named Cockers.
Commercial and residential property values have skyrocketed in Sugar House, and the area can no longer be described as blighted as it might have in the early ’90s. That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to make the conservative landowner nervous, however.
The revolution—against redevelopment and capitalism in general—is being planned in one of Highland Drive’s hole-in-the-wall storefronts. Free Speech Zone sells anti-establishment lapel pins and bumper stickers, but its main purpose is leftist politics. Owners work full-time jobs elsewhere to support the store. Currently, they are helping plan a protest of President George W. Bush’s visit to speak to the American Legion in Salt Lake City on Aug. 30.
Free Speech Zone founder Raphael Cordray volunteers with Local First Utah, an organization dedicated to helping small local businesses win the battle against chain-store dominance. Nate Smith, Free Speech Zone partner, said “the collective” is committed to fighting the good fight against corporate conversion of Sugar House.
“Everybody says they’ve seen it go from being just a wasteland up here to having really cool, local shops, and they want to keep it,” Smith said. Mecham, the landowner, has constructed two high-rise buildings on 1300 East, a few blocks from the central Sugar House business district, and his early plans for redeveloping the area shown to some City Council members included Smith’s worst nightmare: office buildings.
“It wouldn’t even be, like, corporate retail,” he said.
Big-Box Blues
The property owners and potential developers of Sugar House say the right things about respecting the small-scale of area buildings and valuing local businesses. But that’s little comfort to those who remember developers of the Commons mall saying the same things.
A Barnes & Noble that houses a Starbucks now dominates one corner of the central Sugar House intersection, offering an alternative reality to SugarHouse Coffee across the street. There are a few local businesses in the mall, but you have to drive between Old Navy, Rubio’s, Panda Express, PETCO, Maggie Moos and Bed, Bath & Beyond to find them.
What you can’t find at the mall is Spoons ’n Spice, one of the most successful local businesses to develop in Sugar House. Joe Granato started the kitchen-supply business out of a Sugar House duplex and eventually opened up at the local shopping center that later became the Commons mall. Granato, who now operates two other stores, said he tried to stay at the new mall but couldn’t afford the rent.
Constructed in 1998, The Commons at Sugar House resulted from months of compromise with residents. It continues to win praise as one of the best-designed malls in the Salt Lake Valley. Stores in red brick line the street corner, per the Sugar House master plan, and the parking lot is hidden behind. But some still think the end result was a disaster.
Developers “flat-ass lied” about their mall design and openness to local merchants, said Michael Koncar, who sells Grateful Dead T-shirts and hand-blown glass pipes from his store, Wizards & Dreams. While developers met the letter of the compromise, Koncar said the end result isn’t pedestrian friendly.
Jack Hammond, Mecham’s architect, agrees much of the current debate stems from the Commons development, which he calls “disappointing.” Cautioning that the market will dictate what is built on the Granite Block, he said his early drawings called for a mixed-use development of office, retail and housing that attempted to “preserve the scale and feeling of what’s in Sugar House.” That, he said, means a “walkable, tree-lined street front” with frequent entrances from the sidewalk.
Salt Lake City Councilman Soren Simonsen likes the Commons better than most malls, but says for all its progressive design, it’s still a suburban-style mall. An architect and planner, Simonsen noted the lack of people on the sidewalks outside. That’s probably because, even though the stores line the street, nearly all of the entrances are from the interior parking lot. The mall’s buildings have street-side windows required in the master plan, but, Simonsen noted, many windows begin at shoulder height, hardly favorable to window-shopping.
Protecting the feel of Sugar House isn’t only about design, Simonsen said. As important is keeping the small businesses. If the City Council was willing to sink $2 million into the Commons mall, he asks, why can’t the council subsidize rents for small businesses in a new Sugar House development?
When Barnes & Noble opened at the Commons, Betsy Burton’s The King’s English bookshop was nearly put out of business. The mall’s development, with the help of the Redevelopment Agency of Salt Lake City, was a driving force for Burton and other small-business owners to start the Vest Pocket Business Coalition to fight chain stores and governments that subsidize chain-store developments.
Now chairwoman of Local First Utah—a Vest Pocket outgrowth that promotes local buying habits with shoppers— Burton said small businesses will oppose any attempt by the City Council to finance more redevelopment of Sugar House.
Redevelopment agency subsidies, she said, let developers entice chain stores. “It makes it very hard for us to compete because nobody gives us any preferential treatment, ever,” she said.
“Downtown, instead of being enriched by chains, is a wasteland,” she said. “And I am deathly afraid that in the end the same thing is going to happen to Sugar House.”
Sugar House’s landowners have kept the city’s redevelopment agency apprised of planning but have not requested redevelopment monies for projects. Dave Oka, head of Salt Lake City’s redevelopment agency, defended his agency’s involvement in Sugar House, which in addition to the tax rebate for the Commons, included artwork, restoration of the Sugar House monument and assisting restoration of an old schoolhouse for condominiums.
The large stores of the Commons have brought in customers that, in turn, sustain the smaller stores, Oka said. “We were able to take a blighted area and help clean it up,” he said. “It’s become an attraction.”
Salt in the Soup
That view is reluctantly shared by some of the neighborhood’s small merchants. Bob Evans, owner of SugarHouse Coffee, said a smattering of large chain stores has helped. Five years ago, Sugar House was “too edgy,” he said. But, Evans added, enough is enough.
“I think there’s a blend—how much salt can you put in the soup?” he said. “You put too much in and you gag on it.”
Simonsen, an architect and planner, ran for Salt Lake City Council to save Sugar House, and he’s about to make his push. Despite restricting Sugar House development, a 2004 rewrite of Sugar House business zoning “largely ignored” desires of residents. Many of the high-minded ideas in the area master plan never made it into zoning rules.
Next month, Simonsen will ask the City Council for lower Sugar House building height limits, possibly by giving landowners rights to build elsewhere. Simonsen also wants the council to establish historic districts, preserve older storefronts and create a mechanism to retain small businesses.
But Simonsen doesn’t hold out much hope. Changing zoning now—essentially cutting the value of the property just as developers are drawing up plans—would invite lawsuits like those the council faced from Sugar House developers in the ’90s.
Dave Johnson—who also happens to be the former vice president of the Salt Lake City Olympic bid effort—points out that small businesses aren’t the only locals in Sugar House. Like many landowners in the business district, Johnson can claim Sugar House ownership going back generations. His family ran Rockwood Furniture, which Johnson now operates as Rockwood Artists Studios. He hasn’t signed on to any development plans.
Johnson says Sugar House landowners have supported small businesses for years and have as much appreciation for the area’s character as anyone. Re-doing zoning is a recipe for the area’s decay, Johnson said. No one will be willing to invest in Sugar House if they think the City Council is about to rip the land out from under them.
“Any effort by a newly elected public official to open up the process again hurts everyone,” he said.
Doing nothing isn’t an option, Johnson said, noting large sections of Granite Block are empty or little used. He said visions of towering office buildings or rows of big-box chain stores can’t happen, because no area landowner has enough property, let alone money.
“When we were involved in talking to people about bringing the Olympics to Salt Lake, everyone thought it would change the way we live forever,” he said. “Well, it didn’t. Progress should be made in Sugar House, but it’s not going to be anything damaging, in my opinion, because you just have too many people that simply care too much about it.”
The Next Big Thing
Asked where they will go when Granite Block comes down, most Highland Drive businesses have the same answer: the Internet.
That’s one option being considered by Lee Perry, the 23-year-old owner of Elemental Inspirations, a New-Age store. Her business works only because customers, drawn to Sugar House’s vibe, find her store with a minimum of advertising, she said.
Orion’s Music owner Andy Fletcher is determined to stay. He moved his store to Sugar House when rents began creeping up in his previous location in the 9th & 9th neighborhood. He later moved in to share space with SugarHouse Coffee. Fletcher doesn’t think he can afford a remodeled Sugar House but is considering going in with the coffee shop and a denim clothing shop next door. Together, he said, the stores might then afford collective space in a new Sugar House mall.
“I’m bound and determined to be the last independent music store in America,” Fletcher said—and Sugar House may be his last stand. According to Fletcher, once Sugar House becomes unaffordable, there really is no next place for Salt Lake City’s small businesses.
Kitty-corner from SugarHouse Coffee on another corner of the 2100 South and Highland Drive intersection, David Hansen operates The Record Collector. He’s been a Sugar House businessman for 22 years and lived in the area even longer. Hansen recalls Sugar House in his childhood as a neighborhood of mom-and-pops and furniture stores. He charts its decline with the coming of the malls, and sees the seeds of its rebirth being sown by today’s small local shops.
Today, Hansen noted, the malls that took out Sugar House’s shopping district have themselves fallen victim to the next thing.
“Sugar House was a cool place, and I hate to see it go. But it’s what happens,” Hansen said. “Everything kind of goes around and around. Maybe if they tear this all down and build this place that everybody hates, maybe 30 or 40 years from now, this will be cool again.”
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©2006 Salt Lake City Weekly
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