Mayor Glade

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2014

We listed the home of the 25th mayor of Salt Lake City (1944-1956), Earl J. Glade. He was elected to run our capitol city a year before WWII ended. In researching the man I found that he was born in Odgen and worked as a teenager in the mines in Park City as a ‘mud-hen’. He went to college back east, became head of the business program at BYU and subsequently a professor at the U of U. What I find fascinating is that the home in Sugar House is where the very first KSL radio broadcasts were sent from, in an office on the main floor of the home. The telltale evidence is an outlet in the floor about 5″ X 5″ in size and old photos of him in the main floor bedroom/office/broadcasting studio.

The home was built on land deeded to Brigham Young in the 1860’s from the U.S. Government and was turned over in his will to “all the surviving mothers and children of 21 years of age”. According to the web, at the time of his death he had been married or been sealed to 56 women. The 160 acres just south of the now I-15 overpass was cut up and sold off over the years to famous names around Sugar House like William McIntyre, LeGrand Young and Henry Dinwoody. None of the owners back then had any idea that within a few blocks of this land there would later be a Belgian waffle house, dollar movies, brew pups, a state liquor store and a bike lane east to the Shoreline trail and north to the University of Utah and neighboring Westminster College. KSL was originally known as KZN and was the radio arm of the Deseret News paper. The first broadcast was on May 6th, 1922 and was a fireside chat with the LDS Church president Heber Grant. Earl J. Glade joined the station in 1925 and ran operations for 14 years. He was instrumental in creating ‘Music and the Spoken Word’, the longest running radio program on the U.S. airwaves.

Who listens to the radio any more unless it’s Satellite Radio in your car or Pandora on your phone? Back in the 1920’s radio was the only entertainment and news medium in the world apart from newspapers, telegraph and live stage shows. According to early radio history a literal ‘broadcasting boom swept the United States in 1922 and within a year there were 500 stations coast to coast. Many thought it a passing fad and the early radio receivers were too expensive for the average person to afford. Plus, many of the radio consoles were the size of small refrigerators. Now just in Utah we have over 100 radio stations and an unknown amount of pod casts.

My how times have changed since the 1920’s although many of the issues of the capitol city remain the same. Two of Mayor Glade’s biggest campaign issues and projects that he worked on while in office were 1) to get more parking in downtown Salt Lake City and 2) to encourage developers to build more affordable housing.

Prows and Wood

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2014

This summer Utah lost a visionary who built massive affordable housing here. Back in 1953, a self-taught designer named Richard Prows partnered with a local homebuilder and constructed 300 homes in a small town named Bountiful, Utah. Prows bought that man out a few years later and teamed up with an ad-man named Bob Wood and the future for Salt Lake City homeowners was changed forever.

This new team put up homes in the 1960’s in Kaysville, Tooele, Roy, Layton and Salt Lake. Prowswood (the newly formed development team) ventured into a fairly unheard of world in 1963…building condominiums. The first condos were built in Puerto Rico in 1958, but the first condos in the Continental U.S. were built in Utah. The Greystone Manor at 2730 So. 1200 East were the first built in our state thanks to some forward thinking developers and attorneys. They had to lobby the Utah Legislature to approve a ‘housing cooperative’ which was literally based on the ownership style used in ancient Rome where properties were called ‘condominios’. Other developers around the country were beginning to build condo projects and the Fed’s got involved in 1961 by allowing federally insured mortgages for this kind of housing. Bingo! You got loans? We got developers!

In 1963, Prowswood Corp. began developing Three Fountains condominiums in Murray. They were such a new concept that buyers and real estate agents didn’t understand what you owned, how they were run, who paid for what, etc. I had that same problem trying to sell downtown loft spaces in the late 1990’s so I can relate to the confusion of the buyer pool. Soon Prowswood started attracting the demographic we see today for condominiums: empty nesters, people too busy to want to do yards or maintenance, single women who like the security, and couples without kids. Prowswood also built Old Farm, Brookstone and so many more projects around the state from St. George to the north. The company literally spun out thousands of condos in their day. Now the daughter of Wood runs her own company and the manager of Prowswood became a developer himself and is responsible for most of the larger condo and apartment buildings here that have sprung up in the last decade or so.

Many of the original owners of Prowswood condos are still in their units. Others have passed or moved to assisted living. The construction has withstood 50+ years and the landscaping on all the projects has grown into luscious shady greens. New owners have updated their units over the years and enjoy amenities like swimming pools in the summer and snow removal in the winter months. Condo living isn’t for everyone but as someone who has owned and lived in one for years I will take a moment to salute Richard Prows and his vision…because without him I wouldn’t have a place to live! Less and less of them are being built in the Salt Lake Valley and more and more apartments are going up. We’ll just have to wait and see what the future will be for a lock and leave lifestyle that Prowswood was so famous for in their day.

Harvest Days

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2014

Have you ever read a listing for a house for sale or an apartment for rent that advertised one of the added benefits to the property as the ‘fruit trees’ in the back yard? From the Mormon Primary songbook:

“I looked out the window, and what did I see? Popcorn popping on the apricot tree!
Spring had brought me such a nice surprise, Blossoms popping right before my eyes.
I could take an armful and make a treat, a popcorn ball that would smell so sweet.
It wasn’t really so, but it seemed to be, Popcorn popping on the apricot tree.”

If you’ve lived with an apricot tree in Utah when the little orange globes of goodness ripened, you know that often the trees are prolific beyond reason. The farmer’s markets around the state are now full of the abundance of the peach and apple harvest for sale because we’re had an abundant growing season. Yet so much produce from private properties goes unpicked, unused- rotting and fermenting on the ground with a result of your dog getting drunk on falling pears.

There’s a great movement around the country to address the waste of potential local harvests that has filtered into some great programs in Utah. Salt Lake City has jumped on the bandwagon to help reduce food waste at SLC Green: “Each year as they come into season, apricots, apples, peaches and plums often go uneaten, falling in the streets and yards of Salt Lake City. As part of an initiative to reduce food waste, the City has partnered with Tree Utah, Avenues Fruitshare, Green Urban Lunchbox and Salt Lake Community Action Program to create an online database where residents can register their fruit trees.” The inventory of fruit trees helps these organizations create a harvesting program staffed with volunteer groups to harvest fruit and nuts from registered trees and provide occasional pruning of the branches. All information about addresses and homeowners is kept confidential.

If you register your fruit trees on the site you let folks know that you want to share in the harvest. It’s not a sure thing to expect a group of volunteers to show up in your back yard to pick your apples, but it could happen. The programs rely on the amount of volunteers they get who are interested in picking at any given time and the registration of desiring tree owners to share plentiful harvests. Certain trees may not be eligible due to height, hazards or location.
The great thing about clearing out your sagging, ripe trees is that the fruit nudged from the trees will be split with food banks, the homeowner and the pickers. It’s an edible circle of love benefiting everyone. You can register your trees or sign up to be a volunteer at https://www.slc.gov/sustainability/local-food/slc-fruitshare/. I also want to give kudos to the Green Urban Lunch Box (search Facebook) and their mobile school bus /greenhouse. These folk empower people to take control of their food system by demonstrating how to create more urban agriculture and urban farms. Their 35-foot school bus is available as a mobile teaching classroom that travels to schools and community events. They were recently parked at the Craft Salt Lake festival and their big yellow bus had tomato plants exploding from inside out the windows. The sight of it made me and the youngsters around it giggle with glee to see a big mobile garden on our downtown street. Happy harvest you all!