Kilby Block Party pulled off Salt Lake's biggest show, in the rain, and they made it look easy. 

• Josh Scheuerman
• Rivers Cuomo, frontman for the rock band Weezer, performs at Kilby Block Party on Saturday, May 17, 2025.

Even the Roman emperors, at the height of their power and excess, couldn't ride a bike to a Weezer concert. Salt Lakers can.

It's certainly flawed—ludicrous even—to equate ancient Rome with last weekend's Kilby Block Party. Caesar and his successors had chariots and great ships to traverse the known world, flanked by legionaries and roving courts of indentured jesters, cooks and artisans.

But after a long, hot day of conquest and pillaging, all the mead in Germania couldn't make those lute-and-flute sessions sound as good as the guitar riff on "Buddy Holly," and the wait for Cupbop was 2,000 years long. Hard pass.

I touched on this in last week's intro to the 2025 City Weekly Summer Guide, but it bears repeating—Salt Lake City is blowing up, in all the best ways. Kilby Block Party just lit the fuse. For the next three months or so, a person can't swing a dead cat downtown without hitting some great summer programming.

I shudder to even imagine the logistical nightmare of scheduling four days of top-shelf, outdoor, live music. Events like Kilby Block Party have so many moving parts, so many known unknowns, it's a small miracle that they happen at all.

There's a reason that the X96 Big Ass Show doesn't exist anymore. There's a reason SLC Twilight has devolved from the mass-appeal downtown mobilizer to a sporadic and inconsistent younger sibling of its lately-superior Ogden counterpart.

Big events—and big concerts in particular—are f--king hard. And yet, somehow, Kilby Block Party just made it look easy, bouncing from one hot set to the next while juggling a constellation of vendors, lounges, affiliate events and thousands of attendees of varying levels of social intelligence and propriety. They did it in the rain, and they did it in a way that treated locals like royalty.

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But the success of KBP goes beyond the hard work of its organizers and performing talent. It speaks to the broader quality-of-life strategies at play in Salt Lake City that are beginning to bear fruit.

I live in Poplar Grove, the west-side neighborhood directly south of Fairpark, and I was able to attend Kilby Block Party with my wife and son by utilizing the Jordan River Parkway Trail and the free valet service offered by GreenBike. This trail connection, made possible by the recently-constructed Archuleta Bridge, meant that my family's two-mile trip to the Utah State Fairpark included only two blocks of blended traffic and the deadly hazards that drivers impose on non-drivers.

Other locals utilized the new protected bike lanes on 300 North, which have the added bonus of a bridge and elevator to get over parked trains. And I repeatedly saw groups of cyclists and pedestrians arriving on 1000 West, a better-by-comparison street that has recently been made safer and more inviting by the addition of traffic calming features and the closure of a railroad crossing near South Temple, which blocks cars while still allowing people to pass through and access the neighborhood. (Note to the City Council: this is called a "modal filter" and you need to make it permanent).

My friend Skyler and his wife rode Frontrunner down to Kilby from Layton, since the train stops less than one mile away from the Utah State Fairpark. I'd wager that a lot of folks who hunted for a "free" parking space ended up walking from as far or further away. And many other KBP attendees utilized Trax for a ride to Fairpark Station, a convenient option that is unfortunately undermined by the layout of the Utah State Fairpark, which forces transit and trail users to detour around the grounds and enter through a parking lot.

(Sidenote: The fairpark itself is governed by a board of state-appointed suburbanites who have long resisted calls to make the campus more productively urbanist. A few years back, this governing board also killed city plans to restripe and improve 1000 West, insisting instead that the roadway retain its design as a multi-lane surface highway that contradicts the local street context. This story of local city government being overridden by entrenched state interests didn't get much press at the time, because local media is also suburbs- and car-based.)

These new walking, biking and transit trends aren't just niceties, they carry real economic and social value. More people attending KBP through multi-modal travel means less congestion and pollution, acutely in the Fairpark neighborhood but also generally in the broader city transportation network.

It also means more foot traffic in and out of the fairgrounds, which has spillover effects for adjacent west-side retailers as well as the crime-deterring "eyes on the street" effect as folks make their way back home.

On the flip side, hosting incredible talent at a downtown-accessible location where large numbers of people can attend car-free means that more families like my own can spend their time and money supporting artists and having fun and not spend it supporting Big Oil and having road rage. Instead of paying Chevron $50 for a tank of gas, I refueled at Cluck Truck and Proper Burger.

Recent reporting suggests that one out of every four Utah jobs is located within Salt Lake City. And housing prices have dipped slightly as new units open up and relieve the pent-up demand in the market.

The people are already working in the city, they like to recreate in the city, and the data is clear that they'd love to live in the city if they could afford it. And contrary to what the NIMBY naysayers claim, building more homes and amenities for these newcomers will make life better for everyone—and legacy residents in particular—by facilitating healthier connections and filling in the gaps of our built environment.

We just have to remember the thing that makes being a local Salt Laker so great: The city. When so much of what you love is located so close to home, you don't have to drive. Locals get to walk, bike and ride the train.

And for visitors to our fair city, remember the age-old wisdom: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Private Eye is off this week.

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