We are in Salt Lake City. Just as we did in Chicago, we chose a downtown hotel, looking for a little urban fun. What a disappointment! As I think Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, "There's no there there."
You can say this, at least SLC was well lit and quiet -- well-lit by the blazing 101 degree sun and quiet because virtually nobody seems to exist in this downtown. I have never seen so few pedestrians in a city -- it was like a ghost-town. Perhaps that is because more than half the stores are shuttered closed!
We did find a very nice Vietnamese Restaurant and a super independent bookstore. When I complemented the manager at the bookstore on her store, she bemoaned that it was hard to stay in business under the circumstances in this downtown.
She said that when she was a kid, she used to love to go downtown and it was thriving, but that the city's leadership had decided that what was needed was to build 2 malls on either corner of downtown, maybe two miles from one another, and that had killed everything in between. She said that there was talk of now building 2 more malls downtown, right across the street from each other, but that they would connect the two with an elevated walkway, assuring that no one ever walk on a street! What a shame.
We did walk to one of the malls at the edge of town. What a disappointment. Just like a suburban mall, with a zillion chain stores and not one single independent shop. Oh, except they forgot to enclose it, so you could fully enjoy the 101 degree heat.
We are not SLC fans. On the positive side, we stayed at a very nice hotel, feel refreshed for our next drive, and we are just 2 days from reaching Berkeley!
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