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S.L. looking to ditch its stuffy reputation
By Kate Zernike
New York Times News Service
Editor's note: The Deseret News periodically runs stories, such as this, that show what national publications are saying about Utah issues and events.
Local lore has it that Brigham Young settled his Mormon followers in this vast basin because he took one look at it and decided that no one else would ever want to stop here. He made it beautiful in his eyes: a place of temperance, family and clean living.
Then came the Olympics, and the city wanted — needed — the rest of the world to see it as a destination.
So on a corner of south West Temple, they paved paradise and put up a martini bar.
It is called Club Splash, and until two months before the Olympics, it was a dance club for all ages — what one patron referred to as "soft drinks and 16-year-olds." The owners transformed it into three levels of alcohol and attitude, with sleek marble bars and water pulsating through glass walls, at least in part to win the prize of playing host to four Sports Illustrated parties during the Games. Around the corner, Club Manhattan, too, got a pre-Olympics makeover, as did Zipperz, a gay club. In the year before the Olympics, six new liquor licenses were issued in Salt Lake City.
This city, where addresses are determined by their distance and direction from the Mormon temple, has changed. A majority of the population is now non-Mormon. Contrary to public perception, people have been able to buy drinks here — albeit reduced-alcohol — for years. With the Olympics on the way, city fathers even loosened the law enough to allow the revolutionary question "May I bring you a cocktail before your dinner?"
But the image has persisted. And like an insecure high school freshman, the city is going out of its way to prove that it is cool enough to play with the big kids.
"Salt Lake is cool," proclaims an advertisement from the visitor and convention bureau. "Honest." Mayor Rocky Anderson, the self-styled patron saint of sin in Salt Lake City, put out a brochure headlined, "Salt Lake City: Saltier Than You Think!" and made his point in person by taking out-of-town reporters on a club crawl.
The local Olympic organizing committee, which had been under pressure from international Olympic officials to get the city to loosen its strict alcohol laws, created a special concert arena and scheduled Macy Gray, Dave Matthews, 'N Sync and Creed, among other bands — the first time such headline acts have been part of the five-ring circus. When the committee's chairman refused to allow alcohol to be served at the concerts because they were being held on church-owned land (he likened it to borrowing "a barbecue grill from a rabbi to cook pork chops"), the mayor announced that he would stage his own nightly party outside the turreted City Hall — and serve hot toddies and spiced wine.
Anderson admits that his is not the typical mayoral cheerleading — coolness is not the same as corporate tax breaks or good schools. But he says the message is one that needs to get out. "This is an amazing place that is misrepresented," he said. "This is a place where people of any faith, any ethnicity, any race, can get along — and in the process, get a drink if they want to. It's a real island of progress in a state not known for its progressivity."
Then there are those with more subversive ways of showing that this city knows how to have fun. At the door of a popular downtown restaurant last week, the host explained that to serve alcohol and allow its patrons to smoke, the restaurant had classified itself a private club and required a $10 membership fee for entry.
The visitors rifled through their bags for the cash, but he ignored what they were doing, continuing, "Now, if anyone asks, tell them you're here with a man named Ed, and just follow me to your table."
Any city sees the Olympics as a chance to change its status, to become, in the overused phrase, "world class." And Salt Lake City — even though it is the largest city to act as host to the Winter Olympics — was especially eager, bidding for the Games five times before winning them.
"There's something that happens when you get a lot of people from different places," said Devin Overly, 22, a Salt Lake City resident at the Macy Gray concert, held at the Olympic medals plaza. "We're seeing things we've never seen."
His father, Paul, added: "It's perceived as a Mormon weirdo community. It's not that way at all. This has shown the real Utah to people."
Maybe so. But to outsiders, Salt Lake City Cool is proving a tough sell. At the City Hall parties, the crowds were so disappointing that the mayor decided this week to put up extra signs outside to point out the party within, as if the searchlights were not enough. The crowd undulated to Macy Gray, but it grew thin two songs into her set, even as she belted out her Grammy hit, "I Try." This left a crowd of mostly parents and children — many of them Salt Lake City residents who had waited in line at the grocery store for free tickets — dancing in front of the band shell.
"I see more people on the street in Belgrade," said Tamara Pesko, an 18-year-old exchange student who looked out of place, with her fur-trimmed down coat, Burberry handbag and mauve-tinted sunglasses. "Night life? Everything here is fast food."
Nicholas Frankl, a member of the Hungarian bobsled team, had a flask, the only way to get alcohol into the concert.
"It's a town full of weird contradictions," he said.
The city has mastered some elements of attitude — the $40 steak, for example, and the hostess at Metropolitan who maintains that it is absolutely impossible to get in without a reservation, despite the empty tables around her.
But outsiders, particularly Europeans, seem baffled by the friendliness of the residents, especially the gantlet of volunteers who say "Good morning!" and "Good night!" at the entrance to every event or stadium. "They've tried very hard, certainly," Frankl said. "It's not exactly New York, but it's nice."
At Club Splash, Mitch Kirsch, a 37- year-old event planner from Los Angeles, said the night life was far better than he had expected. "But I expected totally zero," he said. "It won't become a destination for the club kids, but it's come a long way."
The changes are too superficial for some of Salt Lake City's potential club kids, who say the city's mostly Mormon lawmakers did not loosen the entertainment laws as much as promised. The increase in the number of bar licenses had more to do with demographics than the Olympics: State law says the number cannot increase unless the number of state residents does, and the birth rate was unexpectedly high last year. Lawmakers have refused to yield to the mayor's crusade to let bars stay open past 2 a.m.
"They're trying to seduce people, to get them in here, but then keep it just the same," Sarah Williams, 25, a patron at Club Splash, complained.
Same, to some, is good. A pre-Olympics editorial in the Mormon-church-operated Deseret News grumbled about the mayor's "cool" campaign, saying it was neither necessary nor desirable to change the stereotype of the city.
"In the long run," it said, "this rather bizarre performance will have all the impact of a snowball thrown against a ski run. A couple of offbeat newspaper stories around the country won't budge this city's image any more than a tour of churches in Las Vegas would change that city's image." There is nothing wrong, the editorial said, with being known more for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir than the club scene.
Anderson still bristles at this.
"There are a lot of people, they don't have any fun in life — they don't want anybody else to have any fun in life," he said. "If they like it calm, they should stay home. There are other people who don't like it calm.
"You wonder, Why don't these people move to an Amish village? A lot of people think this is an Amish village."
Deseret News editor's note: The Deseret News is owned by the Mormon Church but not operated by it (as this piece suggests). Also, the quote attributed to a Deseret News editorial was, in fact, from a personal opinion column by editorial editor Jay Evensen.
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February 18, 2002
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