top of page

Words Words Words

In Frontier Days when the West was wild, Utah too had its wild side. You wont read about it in the high school history books but Utah has had more than its ample supply of entertaining vices. The entertainment contained saloons, gambling halls and bordellos of which many can be found on the 1898 Sanborn Insurance Map of block 70 between State and Main Street and First and Second South. This area surrounded the infamous Commercial Street and Plum Alley. The map showed 3 gambling halls, 19 saloons, 2 wine rooms, 1wholesale liquors, 9 buildings marked FB that housed prostitutes, 2 rescue missions which shared buildings with the prostitutes, 2 chinese opium dens, 3 cigar factories, 2 pool halls, 1 theater, 1 bowling hall and a shooting gallery......

No respect for the historical site of old Saltair

In times of yesterday, old Saltair with its old Moorish style pavilion was one of the most impressive architectural structures in the valley. Saltair was built by the Salt Lake and Los Angeles Railroad and for a time owned partly owned by the Mormon Church. It was a grand building with a central dome more than 100 feet high. It was erected using 2,500 wood pilings that were steam driven in the lake bottom.

Saltair was a gathering place for Salt Lake Valley attracting large crowds to dance on its floating dance floor, or swim in the Great Salt Lake. It was built in 1893, three years before Utah became a state. It had its ups and downs during the next three quarters of a century including a major fire in 1926 that destroyed the structure. It was rebuild the next year by its new owner the Salt Lake and Garfield Railroad. It was still in operation in the late 1950s but suffered vandalism while closed down during the next decade and a second fire in 1970 when it was burnt to the ground.....

Kennecott is looking for better ways to manage its tailings pond since it reopened in 1986. Winds blew the dust over surrounding communities during the shutdown, so Kennecott had to come up with a system to hold down the dust and maintain the integrity of the operation. The tailings were stablilzed and Kennecott continued to work to save the site during the late 1980's and through the 1990's.

When Kennecott's modernization program was finished in 1995 with the construcion of a new state of the art smelter and an upgrade of the refinery operations, the company was already looking at improving the tailings pond operation to be in line with the new volumes of material that would come as waste from the improved smelting process. Currently 53 tons of waste are deposited on the tailing impoundment each year.

The need for a larger and improved tailings impoundment became a priority.  Kennecott engineers and other consultants looked at various alternatives to expand and upgrade the tailings pond. .........

Full articals can be emailed if

needed email your request to Photowordsmith1@gmail.com

bottom of page