Salt Lake’s Ballpark community lost its anchor. These 10 new murals highlight how it’s still ‘unified’

As a Ballpark resident, Alli VanKleeck jumped at the opportunity when she heard Salt Lake City wanted artists to paint new murals all across her neighborhood.

She and Caroline Kane, who make up the mural artist group Smock and Roll, were selected and soon paired with a local business and worked to design a piece that tells a story of Ballpark’s baseball roots and beyond.

Their piece and nine others emerged over the past few months, which city officials and neighborhood leaders celebrated with a get-together with all the artists Thursday night.

“The Ballpark mural program has turned the Ballpark neighborhood into an open-air gallery,” said Renato Olmedo-González, public art program manager for the Salt Lake City Arts Council, in a packed room at Big Willies, a Ballpark sports bar now sporting one of the new murals.

Creating a new outdoor gallery

The project is a few years in the making and mirrors efforts in other parts of the Salt Lake Valley, like neighboring South Salt Lake. The Salt Lake City Community Reinvestment Agency set aside $150,000 for 10 murals scattered across the neighborhood, seeking to add vibrancy.

It reached out to building owners to see who would like to have a mural added to a visible side of their building, and it tapped into the pool of dozens of local artists registered in a prequalified system for future murals to match with a business.

“We wanted to give the artists as much freedom as possible, but we did establish some parameters that we wanted them to honor,” Olmedo-González explained to KSL.com.

While Ballpark is known for and named after its association with baseball for over a century, as home to both Smith’s Ballpark and Derks Field before that, some of the murals highlight its nature, cultural diversity and other lesser-known aspects of its history. Each artist met with the property owner they matched with to brainstorm ideas.

Artists had creative control over their designs, but businesses still had the power to approve or deny a design on their building, said Browne Sebright, a project manager for the Reinvestment Agency.

Smock and Roll applied during the winter and ended with Price Real Estate, which owns the Engine Block at 1388 S. 300 West. Price gave the team a rundown on the building and the neighborhood’s past, including parts they weren’t aware of.

Ballpark was home to a major fire engine producer in the nation at one point, and many of the iconic first cars to race at the Bonneville Salt Flats were built there, too.

“It was very industrial. It was very blue collar,” VanKleeck said. “There’s just a long history of like machinery and racing out there.”

She and Kane merged that history with memories of baseball and added their own artistic humor in tiny vignettes. While they’re proud of their homage to the past, they laughed when they found kids had gravitated toward a piece of their design featuring prayer hands clasping onto a corndog at the rising bar and restaurant corridor.

“We didn’t know that was going to be kind of a pose mural, but it’s great. We love that,” Kane said, with a chuckle.

That’s essentially how all 10 murals came to be over the past few months. Trevor Dahl leaned into the race car manufacturing for his design, also by the Engine Block, while baseball landed in a design Paul Health put up on a building closer to Smith’s Ballpark.

Others featured pieces tied to the business they were paired with, or nature or neighborhood culture. Big Willies added a large mammoth to its western wall, celebrating the Utah Mammoth in the city.

Highlighting Ballpark in a new way

Art, Olmedo-González says, offers communities a way to create their own sense of identity and pride, and reflect a neighborhood’s story through art. The city’s program also helps support local artists and local culture.

As Ballpark’s future shifts in the wake of the Salt Lake Bees’ departure last year, the murals could play into this new identity. It could also improve creativity and economic vitality during the process, Sebright adds.

“This neighborhood has a long history predating Derks Field, but the ballpark has been a huge part of that,” he said. “One of the hopes for this is that this program would be a way for the neighborhood to express itself in its past, present and future forms.”

VanKleeck is thrilled about the new additions as a Ballpark resident. She purchased her neighborhood home just before the Bees announced they were leaving and has been active in helping shape what’s next for Smith’s Ballpark.

She believes the community has become closer since then because it feels overlooked without baseball drawing people in. The murals tie into this by stitching together the many things the neighborhood has been and still is.

“It’s unified us and made us prouder of being the Ballpark,” she said. “Even though the ballpark is ‘leaving,’ it’s almost like it’s forged itself deeper into neighborhood identity. Even if it’s not a literal stadium anymore, the murals are just part of it. … I can’t wait to see what else the community does with this new creative energy.”