The street sign is bent at a 60-degree angle and a rough plywood sign, tacked high on the telephone pole, advertises "Tilling," with a phone number listed. A few early morning joggers run past. Once in a while a Porsche 944 makes an appearance, and on a good day, the ducks stay out of the road. All the while the murky canal flows on, just as it has done for more than a hundred years.
If this entrance doesn't sound especially enticing, it's because you've never driven down the South Jordan Canal Road, a street that many claim is the finest place to live on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley. Holladay has Walker Lane; Draper has Dimple Dell. And Bennion, the little suburb at the heart of the valley - surrounded by Murray, Taylorsville, West Jordan and Kearns - has the Canal Road.This narrow, winding thoroughfare cuts a mile-and-a-half diagonal that begins at 54th South and 27th West and ends at 62nd South and about 19th West. Twenty years ago it provided access to nothing but a few scattered farms, but today the area along the road's banks has become a blend of houses, gardens and pastures.
Settlers dug the South Jordan Canal during the 1890s as part of the valley's irrigation system. The canal branches off of the Jordan River in Bluffdale, at a spot known as the Jordan Narrows, winds in a northwest, diagonal line across the valley through Magna and then finally into the Great Salt Lake. Although the canal runs nearly the entire length of the valley, only a small portion of it is lined by paved road; most of it is still flanked by dusty lanes traveled only by farmers.
Bernice Morrill moved to the Bennion section of the Canal Road 37 years ago. When she and her husband, Cloyd, left their farm near Duchesne to come to Salt Lake City, they looked all over the valley for a place, but liked best the 12-acre spread they found on the Canal Road. "The only thing we didn't like about it was the canal itself," she says. "My son was only 9 months old, and we didn't let him out of our sight." The canal doesn't bother her much now, although it still poses the same threat to children - last summer her great-grandson, Brad, fell in and was rescued by his cousin, Monica, wielding a stick.
Bernice doesn't remember whether the Canal Road was paved 37 years ago, but she does remember that it had only four bridges. Today there are 25, several of which lead to private neighborhoods of seven houses or more. "There's a lot more traffic now," Bernice says. But that doesn't bother her because she still has a half-acre of tree-covered land around her house that serves as insulation. The other 11 1/2 acres of her farm are now dotted with expensive homes, tennis courts and swimming pools. "When we moved here, there was nothing west but dry farms," she says. "We thought this area would never be anything but country."
A hundred yards away, in 1971, Dick and Dorothy Savage built a home on what was once the Morrill tomato field. They had lived for some years prior to that in Taylorsville, next to Meadowbrook Golf Course, which they liked, but they wanted to move out where they could have more land and a few animals. One night they discovered a pasture set on a hill surrounded by old Russian olive trees. Luckily, a piece of it was for sale and they returned a few days later and bought two acres.
Now the area has developed into a private neighborhood of five homes. At the bridge is an imposing wooden sign that says "Private Property" with a map carved into the wood that depicts each house and the name of its owner. White fences line the driveways and each house is set back behind its own pasture, some of which contain grazing cows.
In the 17 years that she has lived on the Canal Road, Dorothy Savage has also seen the area change. "The first night we moved in we opened the doors and heard the crickets," she said. "Everything was farmland. Since then it's been a little spoiled by noise from the belt route." I-215 cuts near the Canal Road as it crosses Redwood Road.
Nevertheless, she and her husband would never give the place up. "We don't need this much property now that our family is grown, but I can't imagine Dick wanting to leave as long as he's physically able to stay," she said. The Savage home is a contemporary brown brick set into a hillside so that the eastern elevation is two stories, the western elevation one. To better catch the panoramic view of the valley, two balconies run almost the entire width of the east-facing second floor. "We can actually see the lights from downtown," Dorothy says. Tall pines surround the house, with the pasture, red-and-white barn, and swimming pool beyond. The place takes plenty of upkeep, but with the help of grandsons and riding lawn mowers, it's likely that the Savages will be able to stay as long as they please.
"There's something about this area," says Dorothy, "and I don't know that I can put my finger on it. As we started to build we had to haul out a lot of stuff from the pasture, and I remember thinking, `What a lovely, peaceful feeling.' My neighbor, Butch Coates, used to say she loved to leave the office because she could drive up 5400 South and then turn down the Canal Road to her own Shangri-La, with the trees and the peace and quiet."
Steve Rees, a real estate agent and the state senator for the area, was living in a neighborhood just west of the Canal Road when he decided he'd rather live on the road itself. "One night my wife, Joanne, and I walked down our street, which dead-ended into Roy Player's hayfield, and we thought it would be a pretty place to build a home," he said. Luckily, Roy was willing to sell, and Steve proceeded to develop the site into nine lots on 10 acres.
As a real estate agent, he sees several things that draw people to the Canal Road: the view, the fact that property values remain steady, good neighbors, good schools and the fact that it's not as crowded as other parts of the valley. The street provides a sense of seclusion, yet it is only 15 minutes away from downtown. "When you get off onto the Canal Road the atmosphere changes - it's a rural feeling," Steve says. "In a way it's like a little island - there are busy streets all around, but this street is a little less hectic, a little less crowded, more country - about as country as you're going to get around here."
But life on the Canal Road is more difficult than lounging around in solitude and going to swimming and tennis parties; the canal itself often complicates things. One problem over the years has been that vehicles and people tend to fall into it. The most notorious incident took place five years ago when Jeff Titcomb reached down to move a Coke bottle out from under his floormat, hit the corner of the bridge and then dumped his Honda Civic into the water. "It didn't start to sink until I opened the doors," he said. He had to call a crane to lift the car out, but amazingly it still ran and he put another 40,000 miles on it before he had to rebuild the engine.
Bernice Morrill remembers the day her oldest son Terry drove a loaded truck of gravel across her bridge and it caved in, causing two the truck's wheels to fall into the canal. They had to build a new bridge after that, which survives today.
Bernice's daughter Marilyn, who also raised her family on the Canal Road, remembers that years ago her son, Bryan, was giving her two-year-old son, Steven, a ride on the handlebars of his bike, when for some reason, they both splashed into the dismal liquid. "Luckily Bryan was able to hold Steven's head above the water," she says.
There have been other accidents as well, like the time Donna Lee Mackay drove into the canal with a carload of kids, and the time Isabel Prince, a petite, sophisticated lady, made the plunge in her Cadillac. None of these people were injured.
Ice and snow make negotiating the Canal Road's curves and bridges especially difficult. Patrice Morrill, Bernice's granddaughter, recalls a snowy morning four years ago when she, her brother Taylor, and cousin Joel drove down the Canal Road to pick up their cousin Steven for school. "There were four of us crammed into the front seat of the truck," she says, "and when we came to the end of the driveway, one of the tires slipped and fell off the edge of the bridge. It was just hanging there - teetering. We just sat there because we thought if we moved, it would go in." Finally, they got up the courage to step out and call a tow truck. "I was glad it happened because we got to miss school," Patrice says.
In reality, these mishaps are rare and are never a point against living on Canal Road in residents' eyes. Families who live here span three and even four generations, which is perhaps the greatest testimonial to the quality of life along the shores of the canal. "Right now we're living with my parents out of necessity," says Heidi Savage, Dorothy's recently married daughter, "but eventually we'd like to build a home on the Canal Road. It's a great place to raise a family." One of the Savages' other married daughters, Heather Gwilliam, also lives on the street, and still another daughter, Sandy Phillips, also lived there for years with her family until they moved to California, when her husband changed jobs. And it's not just the Savage family: there are numerous cases in which children have come back to the canal after marriage.
As the South Jordan Canal Road nears its northern end at 5400 South, it becomes so narrow that when two cars approach from opposite directions, one has to pull over to let the other pass. Sometimes there's not even enough room to pull over, so according to Canal Road etiquette, one car must back up, sometimes 20 or 30 feet, to allow the other car clearance. Eventually, the trees, the bridges, the sunflowers on the banks and the quacking ducks give way to a busy intersection. Say goodbye to Shangri-La.