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6 The Depot To Zion, To Aztlán You could identify Temple Square as the center of Salt Lake City, Utah, and not be wrong. But you might not be 100 percent right. Four blocks to the west, two buildings at the edge of downtown make a strong claim to the historic gravity of the city: the railroad depots. These buildings, separated by a few blocks along the north–south trajectory of the rail line, are both spectacular and intact. Today, they are time warps, legacies from a much different period of Salt Lake’s history, when the city’s existence seemed more prone to chance. The red-brick façades, steep mansard roofs, the mural of Brigham Young and two trains of wagons and bulls high on one of the walls of the Union Pacific Depot, and the sixty-foot-high hall “lighted by three immense arched windows on each side through green opalescent glass” that “gives the room a dignified quietness,” as the Salt Lake Tribune described the Rio Grande Depot just after its construction in 1910,create auras of sublimity.1 Walking through the depots today offers solemn sanctuary from the modern landscapes of consumption that surround them. Hard-soled shoes click and echo in the rooms’ space. The intent of this architecture was not as noble as its form, but just as awesome. The depots are remnants of this Great Basin city’s early industrial arm wrestling. They are the result of the jockeying by the railroads to gain control of Salt Lake, and thus the West. The Union Pacific (U.P.), owned by Edward Harriman, having completed the transcontinental railroad link at Promontory Summit in northern Utah in 1869, dominated the transportation business in Salt Lake Valley in the late decades of the nineteenth century. But George Gould, the son of financier Jay Gould, created his own railroad, the Western Pacific, from San Francisco to Salt Lake. Gould realized that the Denver and Rio Grande was building a line 178 Chapter 6 from Denver to Salt Lake and thus Salt Lake became the linchpin of the two lines that would compete with the U.P. Gould needed an impressive train station to lure passengers away from the U.P. and challenge Harriman’s monopoly. And so the depots are clear symbols of Salt Lake as western city of naked capitalist ambition, as opposed to those of Salt Lake as Mormon utopia a few blocks away, a notion that Utah historians Thomas Alexander and James Allen articulate as, “in its uniqueness, a study of community planning and cooperative enterprise. In its sameness , a study of urbanism in the American West.”2 In contrast to Temple Square’s orderly vision of an urban utopia, this, you could argue, is the heart of Salt Lake’s real urban history, of capitalist competition, and multiplicity .3 Without the infusion of this capital, these buildings and the people who worked in and around them, the Great Basin Kingdom would never have achieved the prominence it now holds. Back from the edges of the urban Great Basin, from the castles in culs-de-sac and pods of sprawl, saltscapes and green dreamscapes, Mormon pride and California ambition, I have landed where I began but not quite. On a day when a frontal storm moving across the west desert threatens to wreck the warm sunshine and blossoms of an early spring, I take Trax from the East Bench to downtown, where Crossroads Mall is being demolished across from Temple Square. But I don’t stop there, continuing west on the light-rail to the terminus at the Delta Center, recently renamed EnergySolutions Arena after a nuclear waste storage and processing company. I walk through the Union Pacific Depot—now with a popular music club in one wing—to the Gateway Mall, the bright yellow product of the 1990s where spurting fountains are marked by the 2002 Olympic Games’ giant snowflake logo and the gaudy Olympics theme anthem plays intermittently; here, as I shoot photos of the street scene along Rio Grande Street, the two young rent-a-cops guarding the southern flank of the mall from the homeless encampments across 200 South approach me and say that I can’t take pictures here without permission from the mall. I ask them whether this is a public street, and they shake their heads. “Not anymore,” they say. Then I walk south through crowds of homeless people lined up for the shelters on Rio...

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