Editor’s note: City Weekly reporter Ted McDonough spent several days observing life in and around Pioneer Park. His time there took him up to and shortly after a fatal stabbing and police shooting in the park on Oct. 10.
3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11: This park is under siege, and not by drug dealers. On the day after a fatal nighttime park stabbing, crews for local TV stations have staked out every corner, reporters are prowling the place usually reserved for the homeless, drug-addled and poor. And the natives are testy.
A young man wearing a hat advertising Sapp Bros.—red scabs covering his face and forearms, biting chunks from his fingers as he talks in a seeming parody of a meth user—says he isn’t giving interviews. The South Carolinian stuck in Salt Lake City until he scrapes together some money says a TV crew talked his significant other into appearing on camera by promising cash, then stiffed the couple. For $5, though, he says he’s got a hell of a story. City Weekly takes a pass. A 24-ounce can of Steel Reserve High Gravity Lager sits empty by a nearby tree as if placed there by an overeager props department.
The post-stabbing media siege is only the latest indignity for regulars of Pioneer Park, which stretches south and east from 300 South and 300 West, a rapidly gentrifying intersection of one-time warehouses-turned-condos or -restaurants. With city elections looming, hardly a fall week has passed without a politician and film crew using the park as a backdrop to proclaim a tough stand against crime.
Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and Police Chief Chris Burbank announced a citywide anti-drug push to begin at Pioneer Park. One week later, it was Dave Buhler’s turn. The mayoral hopeful appeared at the Salt Lake City Police Department’s Pioneer Precinct to announce a plan to blanket the park with video cameras. Mayoral frontrunner Ralph Becker chimed in with a “zero tolerance” message. The following week brought the park stabbing and subsequent police shooting of the stabber—a grisly illustration of the park’s collision course with the neighborhood growing around it.
Stephen Atiana, the 45-year old who stabbed two people—killing one—during an apparent Oct. 10 mugging, was a transient, according to police. Christian Draayer, the 31-year-old man he killed, lived part-time two blocks from the park in the Dakota Lofts, one of downtown’s swankier condominiums.
KSL radio talk show host Doug Wright turned his show over to the park the next morning. “Pioneer Park is a disaster, filled with drugs, crime and filth,” he said, proposing the nearby homeless shelter and soup kitchens be moved. Callers suggested Rose Park or West Valley City.
KUTV 2 news pronounced the park Salt Lake City’s “concrete jungle.” It is possible to conclude that, but with so few people in the park lately, you have to focus your camera in precisely the right place.
Solutions? Ask an Addict
2:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 8, two days before the stabbings: At a paved area near the bathrooms at the park’s center, the energy of crack-cocaine smokers fills the air with an electric buzz. A woman with long hair punctuates sentences by waving an unsheathed hunting knife. A young man standing unobtrusively under a tree spits rhythmically, signaling he’s ready to deal.
Seated at one of the permanent stone picnic tables arguing over a debt is James, a clean-cut man in his mid-30s who slaps his old U.S. Marine Corps ID on the table as evidence of life before he became “a smoker.”
He believes the just-announced park crackdown is real, having been arrested for the first time the week before after four unmolested years in and around the park.
“Mayor Rocky has a zero tolerance. The cops have a job to do, and they are doing it. They showed me if they want to shut it down, they can,” says James, his assertion slightly diminished by the fact that he’s as high as a kite.
Everyone at the park is well-versed in the Salt Lake City Council park debates. James agrees with a park clean-up proposal for which Councilwoman Nancy Saxton was pilloried: stationing police on horseback in the park, as is done in his native Atlanta. James scoffs at a multimillion-dollar park-improvement plan Anderson couldn’t get past the council. “Four million? For what? They already got what they need. All you need is people on horses. Just two patrolmen for eight hours. It’s visibility.”
With an index finger, he lifts from the table something the size of a salt grain. “That is crack cocaine,” he says, sounding nearly as alarmist as talk-show host Wright. “This shit is very blatant. I can understand Magna, or West Valley, but downtown Salt Lake?”
A passing woman interrupts him, “You see a small orange lighter?” “What?” James replies. She repeats the questions several times before he understands, answers in the negative and continues his story.
“You’ve got the police behind you (pointing to the SLCPD’s offices above Iggy’s restaurant on 400 West). Get off your ass. All you’ve got to do is station four patrols. I guarantee you there wouldn’t be one drug at this park,” he says.
Recognizing the difficulty, the city’s recently announced anti-drug campaign combines wide advertising of available treatment with high-profile arrests. Sim Gill, Salt Lake City prosecutor, says visible busts, even with scarce jail beds available, can help not only by discouraging drug dealers but by soothing the increasing numbers of middle-class residents living adjacent to the park.
Pioneer Park’s biggest problem is perception, Gill says. It’s a catch-22. The park is a haven for criminal activity because no one goes there (except for Saturday farmers makets); no one goes there because it’s a haven for criminal activity.
For his part, Mayor Anderson believes park problems would be in the past had the City Council adopted his park development plan. The council “totally blew a great opportunity,” he says.
The candidates to become Salt Lake City’s next mayor, Becker and Buhler, are against large park-infrastructure projects, claiming instead that people can be drawn to the park with more events like the Downtown Farmers’ Market.
“Nuts,” says Anderson. “You leave Pioneer Park simply as grass and a bunch of trees, [and] even with heightened police enforcement, it’s not going to be the sort of place that attracts people,” he said. When events end, “the park returns to what it was before.”
A Dance Between Gritty and Decay
3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11: One of the few large groups at the park the day after the stabbing gathers around a stereo balanced on top of a garbage can. Men aged mid-50s through mid-70s sit at a wooden picnic table staring blankly or engaged in muted conversation as a young teenager does a frenzied dance. A man who claims to be a preacher says he’s in the park because he refuses to go into rehab. He begins to recall a quote from Jesus, “The poor will always be with you.” Then the stereo begins to bleat out “Lean on Me,” and the preacher, with everyone else, turns and begins to sing: “We all need somebody to lean on.”
“Pretty urban, huh?” a passing man says, both acknowledging the reporter’s lone white middle-class face in the park and expressing his own delight at the scene.
The supreme irony of Pioneer Park is that it is precisely the area’s urban qualities that draw development.
"The fact is this is the only neighborhood in all of Salt Lake where we have the potential for the broadest diversity possible, the homeless to very wealthy. To me, that’s the way I want to live,” he says.
Millo and his partner are currently building their second 300 South project, adding 80 condominiums. The new Broadway Park Lofts will include both $500,000 condos and relatively modest $150,000 live-work spaces Millo hopes will attract artists. Next spring, he is set to start construction on a 400 West luxury condo building featuring park views.
About city leaders’ hand-wringing over the park, Millo says, “Frankly, it’s too late.” As more residents and businesses come—many with the help of city subsidies—unsavory aspects of the park will be overwhelmed. “This problem is solved in a few more years,” he says.
City prosecutor Gill warns against too closely connecting the area’s homeless services to park drug activity: Dealers and buyers convene at the park because that’s where the market is, but they come from all over. “The people who might go to the shelter are not necessarily the ones plying a lucrative drug trade,” he says. “If they were, they wouldn’t be staying at the homeless shelter.”
Everyone’s plan for the park
Advocates for the poor who keep tabs on the park, along with the city prosecutor and neighborhood business owners, say Pioneer Park hasn’t suddenly become more dangerous. If anything, it’s milder than it was when former Mayor Deedee Corradini closed the park for three weeks in 1996.
Pioneer Park closes at dusk and doesn’t open again until 7 a.m. Until mid-afternoon, it is nearly empty.
9 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9, one day before the stabbings: Ronald Hathaway and his large, red shopping cart piled high with his possessions stuffed inside black garbage bags are among the park’s only silhouettes.
Hathaway—wearing a blue knit cap and cradling a cup of McDonald’s coffee, his gloves beside him on a picnic table—has spent seasons in the park off and on for 16 years. He’s seen the park change from a homeless encampment in the 1980s—when it was a feeding center for waves of newly homeless created by social-service cutbacks of the Ronald Reagan administration—to the shunned island it is today.
“It used to be this park would be covered in blankets,” Hathaway says. By contrast, the second week of October found around 20 to 30 park sleepers per day, mostly around the outskirts.
Hathaway, a one-time long-haul trucker originally from New York, knows the rhythm of surrounding streets, from the timing of deliveries to Aquarius Fish Co. next to Caputo’s, to the progress of condo projects around the park’s edges. He points past Pioneer Park’s west end to the space that used to be the Salvation Army, now a hotel and offices to EnergySolutions. The park is changing, he says.
“They’re going to make a family park here,” Hathaway says, noting city crews work constructing an enclosed dog park. “They’re cleaning out this place.”
A police car speeds quietly onto the grass in the distance. An officer stops a man, orders him to turn out his pockets, then sends him on his way. “Watch,” Hathaway says as the briefly detained man bends down and, with a quick movement, picks something up off the grass.
“There are about four or five more people to get out of here; then they’ll make it a family park,” he says.
Hathaway is certain the people “to get out” include him. He isn’t a drug dealer but is sure that guys with shopping carts are on the list of undesirables. Salt Lake City’s men’s shelter—located northwest of the park—is being moved out by the airport, Hathaway says. “They’re sending three buses in here to take everybody. They don’t want them back here.”
The rumor—that The Road Home shelter is about to exit the neighborhood—is rampant among daytime park dwellers. It isn’t true, according to shelter directors. The shelter has no plans to move, and it has a pledge from city leaders it won’t be forced out.
Glenn Bailey, director of poor-people’s advocacy group Crossroads Urban Center, notes the park’s homeless have survived several “attacks.” He joined those who fought park development proposals—from a museum of 2002 Winter Olympics memorabilia to a wall of jetted water on which movies could be projected. All were misguided efforts, Bailey says, to overwhelm undesirables with “people from Sandy.” If the city is going to subsidize park redevelopment, he says, it should make room for the homeless as well. After all, they were here first.
Perhaps surprisingly, some area businesspeople agree with Bailey. Both Caputo and Millo would be happy to see the drug trade lessened but don’t have a problem with the homeless, or area shelters.
“Once you start to polish, you polish off some of the good,” Millo says. “I don’t want some draconian movement by the city or anybody else to displace these people.”
“The homeless problem is not that they exist; the problem is that they represent too high a percentage of the population. You increase the population of the neighborhood, then it’s not looked at as a homeless neighborhood.”
Caputo predicts Pioneer Park is Salt Lake City’s future center. “I wouldn’t trade my location for anywhere,” he says. “Gateway is a big Disneyland. This is still kind of a neighborhood. You can go out to the corner and holler at guys. The best part is people want you to holler at them here.”
Park neighbors appear to want to live and let live. There is, after all, plenty of room on 10 acres for everyone. But some park users fear the change headed their way is about making Pioneer Park safe only for whitey.
“Not everyone here is doing what they think they’re doing,” says a woman reading City Weekly at a picnic table. Originally from Chicago, she says the park is one of the few places she can see her “people,” by which she means both black and poor.
“They talk about urban renewal. It’s urban removal,” she says. “There are folks living here. There are homeless and poor in every city. They act like homelessness is eight hours a day.”
“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.
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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