‘Be careful what you wish for’: Park City wants to maintain historic charm as it readies for next era

Park City • Dalton Gackle took a stroll up historic Main Street on a recent Monday afternoon, en route to the mouth of Empire Canyon.

The Park City Museum research coordinator planned to meet a pair of volunteers to help affix colorful historic preservation award ribbons to old mining buildings that, though dilapidated, still stand beyond the Daly trailhead.

The recognition is reserved for structures built at least five decades ago, in an effort to note what came before the ritzy shops and resorts that the mountain city is now known for. “This is a town that really uses its history for part of cultural tourism,” Gackle said.

That history ignited with a late 1800s mining boom in the harsh, high-elevation summer hunting lands of Ute and Shoshone people. About a century later, the industry’s busts brought forth the gritty ski community that began hosting Sundance Film Festival in 1981.

“People who visit here enjoy the charm of our city,” Gackle added, “and that’s based a lot on our historic structures and buildings.”

The 2002 Olympic Games accelerated another era of change, bringing about a development surge that swallowed 40% of its ski-era structures and most of the A-frame homes once synonymous with its early ski town roots, Gackle said.

An estimated 70% of residences are either now vacant or used as second homes, and some owners bristle at the preservation designation because it limits how they can renovate, expand, demolish and rebuild. Gackle worries how the city’s “sense of community” will be impacted if more historic buildings are lost.

Now, Park City is once again on a precipice, planning to host another Olympics in 10 years as climate change threatens its “Greatest Snow on Earth” and its future with Sundance remains uncertain.

All the while, its ad hoc evolution has left it with a staggering wealth gap and a lopsided mix of full-time residents and well off part-timers and vacationers, navigating roads congested with thousands of daily commuters who serve — but can’t afford to live in — the increasingly exclusive city.

“That’s what happens when you pivot,” said Myles Rademan, the city planner who shepherded Park City’s transformation from small ski town to resort haven beginning in the ‘80s. “Be careful what you wish for.”

What’s Park City’s next personality? Officials seem to be angling for a solution that rights some of its past wrongs — building more affordable housing and places for people to put their cars, while maintaining the charm that attracted people to the reimagined city in the first place.

Whatever they do, Rademan, who is nearing 80, cautioned humility.

“We have to be real humble about all this,” he said, “because I can assure you, 100 years ago, nobody would have ever considered skiing as an economy.”

Striking silver under a future ski resort

The Park City of today began to take shape in the 19th century at what is now Deer Valley Ski Resort, 28 years before Utah became a state.

It was there in 1868 that prospectors with the U.S. Army first struck silver. The influx of miners who aimed to find their fortunes led to the city’s official incorporation 15 years later, said Morgan Pierce, executive director of the Park City Museum.

Five years later, with a population surpassing 5,000, it became one of the first cities in Utah with electric light. By 1898, its population had doubled, according to a timeline from the Park City Chamber and Visitors Bureau.

That same year, a large fire consumed the town, destroying 200 of its 350 mostly wood structures. The city rebuilt, but in 1902, dynamite stored in the Daly West Mine exploded, killing 34 miners.

It was the largest disaster in the city’s mining history, inspiring a new state law that mandated that dynamite could no longer be stored underground. The mine’s shaft house still stands near the base of the Bonanza Lift at what is now Park City Mountain Resort.

There were cave-ins and floods in the years to come. And there were booms and busts. Still, Park City’s underground veins of valuable metals remained profitable, becoming one of the largest mining districts in the American West through the 1920s as miners drew out not only silver but also gold, copper and iron.

There are still anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 miles of retired mining tunnels in the area — about the distance from Park City to Chicago — with some shafts jutting down deeper than 3,000 feet, Pierce said.

From ghost town to ski town

Mines were a moneymaker — until they weren’t.

The decades-long downturn that began with the 1929 stock market crash caused Park City’s population to dwindle, so much so that, even with about 1,000 people still living there, it was considered a ghost town in the 1951 book “Ghost Towns of the West.”

Meanwhile, skiing down the area’s hollowed-out mountainsides became more and more popular. By 1946, the town’s first ski lift was installed, three years before most mines had officially shuttered.

The area’s first ski resort was born out of a massive United Park City Mines rebrand. The company asked the then-federal Area Redevelopment Administration (now the Economic Development Administration) to finance its pivot with a $1.25 million loan.

Its goal? Transforming the former mining town into a skiing destination.

The money covered a gondola, chair lift and two J-bar lifts. The 10,000-acre Treasure Mountain Resort — which later became Park City Mountain Resort — opened in 1963. Lift passes were $3.50.

Rademan first visited Park City nine years later. He was on the way to a conference in California when he stopped in for lunch and recalled thinking, “Oh, this place is a dump.”

Little did he know he would return to Park City in the late 1980s as its city planner, tasked with shepherding the burgeoning ski town into its next era.

His first strategy involved photographing the eyesores he remembered seeing as an outsider. He then pitched the idea of sprucing up Main Street by removing boarded-up buildings, beautifying what remained and preserving open spaces to set the town apart.

“It’s not rocket science,” he said.

He was drawn to the Park City job after working to transform Crested Butte, Colorado — a former coal mining town that was also reimagined into a skiing destination.

“I’ve always been interested in these little places that were neglected,” he said. “Places, I call them, that America forgot, and that sort of ended up in a time warp.”

One of Rademan’s earliest tests came when a local grocery chain wanted to construct a supercenter off State Route 224, about 4 miles off Interstate 80.

“I remember going to the [City Council], and I said, ‘If we do this, your dreams of becoming a world class resort just went out the window,’” he said.

In an alternate universe, the area could have looked like the franchise-filled Kimball Junction.

Instead, council members listened. The preserved alpine vista remains demarcated as a local historic district, featuring the iconic white McPollin Barn in the foreground and ski slope-carved mountains in the background — a serene place crisscrossed with the city’s extensive trail network.

From community to consumerism

In the early days of Park City’s resort transformation, it still retained its small town feel.

“You used to go to the grocery store, and you knew everybody there,” said Tom Clyde, former city attorney and longtime columnist at The Park Record. “If you’re going for a quart of milk, you’d usually plan on a half hour, just because you’d run into so many people you wanted to talk to.”

That didn’t mean the city was functional, he said. Keeping up with growth meant building out new streets. After decades with only one snowplow in operation — originally donated by Union Pacific Railroad — officials had to secure better vehicles.

The water system was also muddied by the town’s mining past. Early excavators often hit pockets of water inside mine shafts. In some spots, miners blasted drainage tunnels to move that water out.

The problem: The diverted water picked up tiny deposits of harmful metals as it flowed away, ending up in local streams and eventually Parkites’ cups, said Michelle De Haan, the city’s water quality and treatment manager.

This time of change attracted recent college graduates — young people who poured in to become its architects and engineers, because few with established careers were willing to take the risk on the relatively tiny town, Clyde said. Many stayed to start businesses: day cares, theaters and restaurants.

“If any of them ... realized how tough it would be, how nearly impossible it would be, to build this place, we wouldn’t have tried,” he said, “but because nobody knew any better, we just jumped in.”

That’s not the case anymore, Clyde said. Many businesses today are “absentee-owned.”

“Their livelihood is in some other state,” he said, “and so they are less connected and less unified in what they want to see as a community as a whole.”

Tana Toly saw the shift in real time. Her family has been in Park City since its inception — one side miners, the other Mormon pioneers.

Her grandparents first opened what’s now considered the city’s longest-running family owned business in 1962, selling beers for a dime a piece at the bar that would become the Red Banjo. About 10 years later, her grandma pivoted, turning the Main Street joint into a pizza place.

Another decade after that, the matriarch made the prescient choice to buy the building, which ultimately kept them open, because as property values increased, they weren’t paying rent. Toly, who is a city councilwoman, now co-owns the restaurant.

“There’s a whole lot of people living here [now] who have nothing to do with tourism and have made all their money somewhere else,” she said.

These are the same people who push back against tourism at City Council meetings, Toly added — an industry that many Parkites even 15 years ago were still working in, often at hotels or ski resorts. The pandemic worsened the divide, bringing in a wave of outsiders who wanted to live more permanently in their vacation homes, Toly said.

Her concern now isn’t so much that Park City will falter, but how it can retain its “small town, historic character” while “development is still coming and knocking on the doors.”

What’s next?

With the 2034 Olympics as their north star, Mayor Nann Worel said in a written statement that officials are being “deliberate and strategic” right now about future growth.

This year, the 3Kings Water Treatment facility opened. The more than $80 million facility is the city’s most expensive public utilities project to date.

Also on the table is The Main Street Area Plan, which the City Council is currently mulling. It aims to increase parking and access in the historic district, plus create more pedestrian-friendly spots and build more housing for the area’s workforce.

“We are focused on ensuring that growth and development, no matter where it takes place, mitigates or improves community challenges like housing, transportation, quality of life,” Worel said.

Gackle on his Main Street walk pointed out a historic, 496-square-foot home that he said he’d love to live in with his wife. They’d be full-time, lifelong residents, but it’s on the market for $1 million and they can’t afford it. Those who can, he said, will likely turn it into a vacation rental.

By comparison, Rademan said he purchased the lot his home sits on near the Park Meadows Country Club in the late 80s for just $35,000. Plenty of others could have done the same, he said — but no one wanted to buy. “It wasn’t worth it,” he said.

Worel believes the town’s clogged roads and lack of affordable housing in part stem from its history — that no one knew “just how successful Park City would come.”

“Unparalleled success,” she said, “comes with its challenges, but the character and culture of Park City remains intact.”

You can still find that “old soul” of Park City, Clyde said, if you know where to look. He finds it among the longtime friends and places he frequented that still remain, like up on the “ski hill” where he first strapped on a pair of skis at 9 years old.

“That’s always home, even though it’s getting busier and kind of crowded,” he said. “You get up there, and it’s just good for the heart.”

That escape is still the root of Park City’s tourism economy, Rademan said. But so is its exclusivity.

As he prepares to retire, he said, the town’s draw now is no longer just its skiing but rather experiencing the destination itself — walking or biking its trails, shopping and eating at its restaurants, checking out the local markets and, of course, carving its famous slopes.

There’s nowhere quite like Park City. The problem, he said, is there’s no way to “build enough for everyone who wants to live here.”

“I always say, ‘If you’re lucky enough to be in Park City, you’re lucky enough.’”

Correction • Sept. 13, 2024, 10 a.m.: This story has been updated to reflect which Park City mine explosion resulted in a law change regarding underground dynamite storage.

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