MAIN STREET PLAZA — So this is the place that is dividing the community, pulling angry words and lawsuits out of people who, we are left to assume, would otherwise be happy to go about their lives in a spirit of peace and harmony.
It's odd to imagine, really, as I sit here on a sunny early autumn day. This is no Berlin Wall, ugly and foreboding. It is not Jerusalem's Temple Mount, where rival religious groups lay claim. It is not a freeway or a landfill or a prison — the kinds of things that often divide and lead to long battles among factions of a community. This is a place of waterfalls, grass, flowers and trees; a place designed intentionally to evoke quiet introspections; a place that brings to mind, for lack of a better word, peace; and certainly a place that ought to be considered an asset to the downtown of any large city.
That was how Mayor Rocky Anderson and his staff saw it two years ago during their first official tour of the place. Even Deeda Seed, who as a councilwoman voted against the city's decision to sell the block to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and who subsequently went to work for the mayor, acknowledged the plaza was a beautiful addition to the city.
"I had great concern about the traffic issues and whether it was appropriate to sell such a large chunk of public right-of-way to a private entity," she said at the time. "But it's over now, and we need to move on."
Move on? That can be an excruciating process for some. Lawsuits followed, claiming the city had no right to maintain an easement through the park while giving up certain free speech rights for all who walked through it. A federal judge dismissed those claims. Then a panel of three appeals court judges overruled that dismissal. And now the peaceful plaza that virtually everyone agrees is a beautiful asset to the city is as divisive a battleground as ever.
Perhaps this is Salt Lake City's fate as home to both a large and growing worldwide church and an equally large collection of people who don't belong to that church — a percentage of whom view it, in some way, as a threat.
The battle is hardly new. These same tensions were strong more than 100 years ago when the construction of the City-County Building was mired in controversy. The People's Party, which traditionally had been supported by church members, was in charge when the city decided to build it. But construction was so expensive that the anti-Mormon Liberal Party used the building as a wedge to seize control of both the mayor's office and a majority of the council for the first time ever. Then, after a time, the Liberal Party was accused of wasting money as the project was abandoned, re-started elsewhere and then languished as Utah and the nation fell into an economic depression. Workers were striking regularly. It was a mess.
But no one remembers that today because, in the end, the building was so beautiful it helped heal rifts in the community. The city asked the president of the church to offer a prayer at the dedication.
Most people, in other words, moved on. Today, the City-County Building is widely recognized as one of the city's jewels.
The idea for the Main Street Plaza didn't suddenly materialize out of thin air four years ago. In 1962, church, civic and community leaders came together and wrote a master plan for downtown called the "Second Century Plan." The 14th and final element of that plan was to close Main Street between North and South Temple and to turn it into an open-space plaza. That plan also brought City Creek to the surface and created Brigham Young Historic Park.
But 1962 is a long drive from 2002. Today the church's request that people on the plaza refrain from "engaging in any illegal, offensive, indecent, obscene, vulgar, lewd or disorderly speech, dress or conduct" seems out of step with a culture that views such things nightly on TV. What a shame.
Mayor Anderson is doing his best to pull all sides together and find a workable solution to this problem. Everyone seems to want to move on, but they don't quite know how. I know all the arguments, all the details of the legal wrangling. They seem like hopelessly convoluted entanglements to what ought to be a simple issue.
I have come here several times since the plaza was built, but always in a rush. Today I am taking my time, trying to absorb the atmosphere and understand why this quiet place, where the trickling water of a fountain erases much of the noise of the surrounding city, is so offensive.
I still don't get it. But then, the place seems beautiful enough that, when people do finally all decide to move on, I have no doubt future generations will view it as a jewel, just like the City-County Building.
Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com