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Saltair
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| About the photograph: I am standing on
the shore of the Great Salt Lake in the center of pilings that once
held a railway line that led to Saltair, the LDS
Church’s day-trip resort. I am looking back at I-80; to
my left, it is fifteen miles to Salt Lake City. To my right, it leads to
Tooele (pronounced “Tuh-WILL-uh.”) The sand I am
standing on is soft, alkaline, dry and dusty on the surface, spongy
and unstable underfoot. The smell is pervasive, a reek of
sulfurous decay, redolent with rotten eggs and dead brine shrimp. It’s an
enervatingly hot day, and I am glad to have brought adequate water.
Few places in Utah show such compelling and dramatic reminders of impermanence.
Saltair was once a thriving and popular destination, drawing thousands of visitors per day in the teens and
twenties; business declined in the thirties, but still the owners (a major partner was the LDS Church) thought
it would be profitable to rebuild Saltair in a new, improved, larger-than-ever manner.
The railroad was called the Salt Lake, Garfield & Western:
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Saltair 2, shown above, was used effectively in the 1962 Cult horror favorite, Carnival of Souls, directed by Herk Harvey, starring Candace Hilligoss. While the movie is billed as “filmed in Lawrence, Kansas,”, anyone familiar with Salt Lake City will immediately spot that a great deal of the footage was shot there. Familiar intersections, the City-County Building (then simply the Courthouse), and ZCMI make appearances. For those worried about such things, it is not a very scary film, and there is much detail of the amusement park that can’t be had anywhere else. |
| Approximate location of Saltairs 1 and 2 View Larger Map |
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| Location of Saltair 3 View Larger Map |
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The only book on the Park features great photographs, but is not as detailed as I would have liked. It’s worth tracking down for the pictures alone. |
