Fear and Loafing in Pioneer Park 

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“This is our lives”
5:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11, the day after the stabbings: As if a shift whistle has just blown, the park clears out. It is already bitingly cold in the shade. All eyes are briefly drawn to the park’s north end where a man zig-zags to elude a pursuer before dropping to the ground in a fetal position where he is punched and kicked. His attacker, a big guy with a shaved head, white T-shirt and a leather coat, rifles his victim’s pockets, then walks out the other side of the park. The beating took less than a minute. An ambulance takes the victim to a hospital to check out a kick to the head.

At the park’s westernmost end behind a seldom-used playground, a homeless Northern Ute woman sits quietly on a bench beside an older man who is greeted by a Spanish nickname as people leave the park.

“We don’t know anything about the shooting,” she says before being asked.

She insists park regulars aren’t going anywhere. “I feel this park is a part of me,” she says, noting Pioneer Park is built on top of an old Native American burial ground.

For the Ute woman, the current attention to the park feels racist. Last night’s tragedy was not about a stabbing incident, but about a policewoman shooting a transient.

“Why don’t they focus on rapists, child molesters, thieves? Why does this park have to be the center attraction?” she asks. “We’re all trying to make a living one way or another. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a prostitute or a drug dealer, whether you’re a businessman. You can’t put us down and disgrace us for how we make our living. This is our lives. Why don’t you just let our lives be?

“They’re trying to take over everything, trying to close everything in and trying to take everybody out. That ain’t going to happen. Ain’t nobody going to kick nobody out because we’re in America.”

Short of the busses Hathaway predicts are coming to haul everyone away, she’s probably right. With the near-west side of Salt Lake City’s downtown becoming the new hub of development, Pioneer Park is increasingly hemmed in. There is nowhere else to go. As Pioneer Park’s diverse residents are forced into increasingly close contact, they may have to learn to get along. If, that is, the politicians let them. —Ted McDonough

Market Forces
While city planners scratch their heads and toss around plans to “save” Pioneer Park from drugs and drifters, the prospect for a newly proposed year-round farmers’ market might be just the solution— that is, if it were to end up there.

Downtown business leaders are proposing a full-time market but, along with the Salt Lake City Council, oppose putting it in the park.

Such a venue would give vendors commercial space to sell their goods every day, rain or shine. It’s an amenity many big cities with more temperate climates enjoy—Los Angeles, Dallas and San Francisco among them. Early sketches of the full-time market include plans for concrete stalls with electricity that could accommodate vendors in winter. While organizers of the original Downtown Farmers’ Market are spearheading this project, boosters are mum about the proposed location—except to say it will not be in Pioneer Park.

Bob Farrington, executive director of the Downtown Farmers’ Market and principal architect of the new year-round market, believes that holding the new year-round market at Pioneer Park is not a logical fit.

“With the Farmers’ Market, we may have from 7,000 to 10,000 people with over 250 vendors. Because that market has to accommodate all those vendors, it requires almost a 10-acre site. A [permanent] public market would be a much smaller enterprise,” Farrington says, estimating the year-round market will accommodate only 20 to 30 vendors.

“You don’t need that big of a site [as Pioneer Park]; for a public market, it would just be too much,” Farrington says.

The Downtown Farmers’ Market is considered by many to be a saving grace for an area affected by vagrancy, drug activity and other criminal activity. Arguably, placing the new market in the park could help reduce crime there.

“Taking public spaces that are a forum for low-level crime and making them into more attractive or commercially viable spaces can be an important part of a larger strategy for dealing with crime in an area,” says Christopher Stone, Guggenheim professor of the practice of criminal justice at Harvard University.

Beyond crime prevention, the larger concern is how would the two markets coordinate?

For the past 15 years, the Downtown Farmers’ Market has operated as a gathering place for local farmers and craftsmen to sell everything from locally grown cherries, apples, peppers and goat cheese to crafts like hand-knitted beanies and yard art. But could the proposed year-round market “steal” business and vendors away from the original?

Farrington is adamant that it would not.

“I suspect that some of the year-round vendors would also stay in the Farmers’ Market,” he says. Farrington also suggested that, through joint-marketing methods, the two events could be linked together. He reiterated that the new market would not overshadow the old. “We wouldn’t do it if it were to negatively impact the Farmers’ Market.”

Farrington says the Downtown Alliance is only beginning feasibility studies and has recently hired a consultant to assist in the planning. —Eric S. Peterson
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