Wednesday, October 19, 2022
Spooky Streets
Posted By Babs De Lay on October 19, 2022, 4:00 AM
Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front are rife with tales of haunted houses, graveyards and spooky streets. My wife and I had our own spooky street experience the other evening after leaving an event downtown.
After supporting a local eatery close by, we made the short walk to Symphony Hall where we enjoyed a speaker but bugged out during the Q-and-A to get home a little earlier. As we walked down the stairs outside, we encountered a young man who was sitting at the edge of the building and he asked us if we had any change.
It was dark, but I could tell he was as tall as a small tree and just as strong. His clothes were sparse but not dirty and he looked to be a senior in high school who had just left his football practice.
When I lived in New York, my dad would always give street people change. At times over the years I have vacillated from walking right by them or stopping and engaging them by offering a few bucks and maybe the leftovers I was bringing home from a local restaurant, or offering to buy them a bottle of water or food item if we were near a bodega. For me, it usually would boil down to "Do I have the time to stop for this person?."
Nowadays, I have decades of experience of living and working downtown and giving a few bucks to that skinny beggar without shoes on is just part of daily life. I don't judge. The Downtown Alliance doesn't want me and others to enable more begging and so a few years back installed red meters scattered across city blocks. (This was when SLC got rid of coin-operated parking meters and had many old ones to recycle).
You're supposed to put your spare change into these meters and not into the hands of the needy. However, I have never seen anyone stop to feed the "homeless meters." I know that people do donate—and the Alliance does give all proceeds to services helping those unsheltered in our area via the Pamela J. Atkinson Foundation—but we need to do a better job of telling the public what these red meters are and mean.
My wife struck up a conversation with the young man and found out he was from New Orleans. It was 9:30 at night, and we couldn't think where to refer him to for shelter. There wasn't anything downtown we could think of that was open and the men's shelter was out south (and we were headed north).
We gave him more than enough to cover bus/TRAX fare south and when he asked for my wife's half-empty water bottle, she gave it gladly. These streets are going to get scarier for the unsheltered as it gets colder and yet, we still haven't made a sustainable dent in this problem, making it a spooky future for all of us.
About The Author
Babs De Lay
A full-time broker/owner of Urban Utah Homes and Estates, Babs De Lay serves on the Salt Lake City Historic Landmark Commission. A writer and golfer, you'll find them working as a staff guardian at the Temple at Burning Man each year.
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