Movie scouts from the Disney Channel were looking for "small town America." So they climbed up to the roof of Sterling Furniture in Sugar House on a recent spring afternoon and surveyed the street below. From there they could see the little shops, and the trees lined up in a pretty row, and that revolving blue ball on top of Granite Furniture -- the one that looks like Sputnik -- as perky and goofy as a bygone decade.
Stand on the roof and squint just right and Sugar House does look like the small town we can all imagine we grew up in.There is a charm, still, to Sugar House, despite the natural proclivity of developers to turn it into West Jordan. But the real Sugar House is also more complicated than that.
At the turn of the millennium, downtown Sugar House is equal parts Disney Channel, Home Shopping Network and Fox; a place both mainstream and eddy. In downtown Sugar House we get a glimpse of the country's evolving urban landscape and the irksome questions it inspires.
What kind of place do we want to live in? Who do we allow to be there? What do we keep and what do we throw away?
Climb down from the roof and you can see Sugar House up close: the tattoo parlors and the palm reader's studio and the mannequin with the whip in the window of the Blue Boutique; the trendy new shopping development going up on the corner.
Stand on the sidewalk at the intersection of Highland Drive and 2100 South. Highland Drive here is like the border between two countries.
On the east side you've got The Commons at Sugar House, whose tenants include Barnes & Noble, Old Navy, Wild Oats. With its forest green awnings and big warehouse windows, its landscaped creek and its trendy chain stores, The Commons is tasteful, tidy and safe.
On the west side of the street you've got a different country. Here you'll find Stinky's Scooter and Skate, the Hip Hop Shop and the Tap Room, where the jukebox is still playing Roger Miller's "King of the Road."
At Ward's one-chair barber shop a half block to the west, the buzz is that the Marriott Corp. is thinking of putting a hotel on the southwest corner of Highland and 21st. Like a lot of old-time businessmen in the area, Ward Adams wouldn't mind seeing something like a hotel go up there.
Or a mall. Something brand new like The Commons across the street. Plenty of people would like that, says Stephen Richards, a member of the board of directors of Granite Furniture; to gut the whole block and start fresh.
The word on the street also is that the Boyer Co., co-developers of The Commons at Sugar House, would love to get rid of unseemly businesses like the tattoo parlor on the west side of the street.
The buildings that Richards and others would like to see come down include a two-story row of shops in the 2100 block of Highland. Built in the early 1900s, for the past several decades it's been covered with mustard-colored anodized aluminum decorated with rust-colored aluminum arches -- a facade that reminds us what a confusing matter style and authenticity, and even progress, can be.
Some people wish the building's owner would rip off that facade and restore the old brick building underneath. Across the street at the brand new Commons at Sugar House, they point out, there are brand new brick buildings designed to look much like the genuine old brick building now covered up with aluminum. The bricks on the new building have been specially made to look old.
It's hard to find anyone who can remember exactly when the aluminum facade went up, although the guess is that it was sometime between the late '50s and mid-'60s. That's about the time when salesmen went door to door across middle America extolling the virtues of fuss-free aluminum siding.
The building was owned by Bob Hansen then. As John Walton, former president of the Sugar House Chamber of Commerce remembers it, a lot of the area's other businessmen had been after Bob for years to update the building. The feeling was that the brick building underneath was just too old-fashioned.
The Sugar House merchants of 1960s could see that their downtown was a shopper's no-man's land half-way between downtown Salt Lake City and the climate-controlled enticements of Cottonwood Mall. If they wanted to attract customers, they reasoned, they would have to look up-to-date.
Like clothes and furniture, styles in architecture and building materials have a fashion half-life: about five years for clothes, 10 for furniture. For commercial buildings it's about 20 years, which is about the same as the half-life for baby names.
Wait around long enough, though, and most of the clothes and furniture and building styles and names become popular again, crossing that murky line between dated and retro.
Rose West is the co-proprietor, with her brother Ivan Saunders, of Timeline, a Sugar House store that sells retro furnishings. There are things for sale in Timeline -- old chrome bowls and black-and-white TVs -- that you yourself might have cast off and sent to Deseret Industries years ago, only to find them now bringing a pretty penny at Timeline. Around the corner there's a retro furniture store, selling the kinds of armchairs that, if you're an aging baby boomer, your mother might have owned, the kind of chairs you would never have imagined would ever be cool again.
To some of us, aluminum is the polyester of building materials. But Rose West thinks the aluminum facade on Highland Drive is retro and definitely worth keeping. Pretty soon, she knows, there won't be many examples of 1950s aluminum siding left. Pretty soon, in fact, the aluminum siding will be old enough to be eligible for the National Historic Register.
The point is that sometimes it's hard to know what's worth saving and what isn't. After a while, velour armchairs and Sputnik signs and a whole aging downtown may take on a certain surprising charm. Aluminum siding might even be worth saving, although that still seems a bit of a stretch.
But the bigger question is: Do we want Sugar House to be a series of new malls and shopping centers, even if -- as is the case with The Commons -- they're relatively charming as shopping centers go?
Maybe it's the very ordinariness of old Sugar House that is the most retro thing of all: the little two-story shops that hug the street, the fact that the shops sell washing machines as well as cappuccinos, that a business called Asphalt Maintenance occupies an office upstairs, that the rents are low enough to allow small businesses to have a chance.
Maybe we might even want a place for tattoo parlors. We might want a place that hasn't been torn down and done up fancy. A place of surprises, even if some of them make us a little uncomfortable.