In 1956, with the state prison having been safely moved to Point of the Mountain, Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County agreed to mutually maintain the land on which it once stood, newly christened Sugarhouse Park, with the agreement to expire after 99 years.
Being now at almost the exact midpoint of that agreement, the Sugar House Park Authority wants to set the park's direction for the next 50 years.
"Times have changed, populations have changed, uses have changed," park authority president Rita Lund said. "We're getting requests for a lot different events than we have in the past."
The park has long been heavily used. On any given day you'll find joggers, dog walkers, in-line roller skaters, Frisbee throwers, picnickers, nappers, soccer, lacrosse, basketball and baseball players, people flying kites, children on the swings and, in the winter, sledders. By a very conservative estimate (counting only formally reserved functions and events), the park experiences well more than 100,000 visits per year.
"You can go up there and almost every weekend somebody is holding a 5K race or a walk or something," said park authority staffer Craig Cheney.
More than 60,000 people attend the Independence Day fireworks at Sugarhouse Park, and many thousands of uncounted people go there for informal activities.
It's that "uncounted" part that has Lund and her colleagues on the park authority board concerned. They only have an approximate idea of how many people use the park, how they use it, how many come from the Sugar House area or farther afield, whether residents would like more structured events (or fewer), how uses impact local residents.
Generally, planners recommend that parks get an updated master plan every 10 years. Sugarhouse Park hasn't had one for 50 years.
"How do you balance out the public usage as opposed to these more structured uses?" Lund said. "We need to have a guidance tool."
Two years ago the county donated $25,000 toward the master plan effort, but that money has lain fallow since Salt Lake City, its partner, hasn't yet been able to scrape up like monies. The two localities each contribute about $160,000 annually for the park's maintenance.
The sheer number of organizations — not to mention individuals — that use the park in one way or another is staggering. The Great Salt Lake Audubon Society meets at Sugarhouse Garden Center. Strut Your Mutt events draw various people with various dogs. Innumerable running organizations and associations take advantage of the park's 1.5-mile interior paved loop road or the 1.9-mile perimeter trail. Private companies hold parties at the park's seven "terraces" — gathering places with pavilions for barbecues and the like. Highland High School uses the soccer field and baseball field for school games. Even the Society for Creative Anachronism has held events there.
"On the shores of this lake (the Sugarhouse Park pond) the Shire did meet for the tourney to determine the Conqueror of the Great Brine Shrimp and Defender of the Shire," a recorder of the society's anachronistic deeds stated on a Web site.
The pressure for using the park — especially the athletic fields, which Lund says "we could fill up every hour of every day, but we don't want to do that" — is immense, and becoming more so.
"We're deluged with requests," Lund said. "Do we want the park to be open when people can come in and not hear the crack of a baseball bat? It's a hard thing to balance."
That's especially so when Sugarhouse Park is known for its open nature. The 100-acre Liberty Park near downtown has numerous, large, old-growth trees and several facilities that are lacking at Sugarhouse: tennis courts, the Tracy Aviary, a museum, pools, a sand volleyball court. That makes the Liberty Park more versatile but gives it a more closed feel than Sugarhouse.
"It does restrict green space," Salt Lake City parks superintendent Val Pope said. "That's just the way it's turned out."
"The main feel of Sugarhouse Park is that wide-open space," Lund said. "We've always tried to keep the nature of Sugarhouse Park that big expanse of grass and not so many trees as Liberty Park. People have expressed to us their liking for that."
Sugarhouse Park is considered a "regional" park — not limited to use by nearby residents — and the valley's population continues to increase, as well as grow denser around the park's periphery.
Park authorities also have to deal with changing technologies. Recently the board was approached by an enterprising man who wanted to erect a full, inflatable movie screen in the park for summer showing of family movies. Board members liked the idea, but every use like that impacts other users. Likewise for the ice-cream vendors that on occasion lobby to bring their trucks in to sell the kiddies a treat.
The balancing act is nothing new. The same thing happened half a century ago.
When the prison moved in 1951, land developers proposed all kinds of things for the place where Mormon polygamists, union organizer Joe Hill and other notable prisoners had languished. Among other ideas were a golf course, an amusement park, a tourist campground and a department store, according to the Utah State Historical Society. (Then-governor J. Bracken Lee, a tight-fisted sort, was sympathetic to private development, saying the city had "no business" building a park.)
But park proponents won out. Now its up to park supervisors to determine the course of the next 50 years.
E-mail: aedwards@desnews.com