The Granary, The Florist and the theme park-ification of Salt Lake City 

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In David A. Banks' 2023 urban theory book, The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America, the author tells a story about a bar in a small-ish city that feels very familiar. In his hometown of Troy, New York, Banks describes a local dive bar that is bought by the locally famous owner of a string of businesses that got their start with the Charles F. Lucas Confectionery and Wine Bar.

"The name was plucked from one of the building's many tenants over the years—a candy shop that had opened in 1863," Banks writes. "Had they named the place after the most recent tenant, it would have been called the Troy Insurance Agency and Wine Bar."

But the dive bar acquired years later was Bradley's Tavern, previously owned by an actual person named Bradley. And the new owners changed nothing much about the dive bar that they exclaimed was already "perfect," except for adjusting its name to "The Bradley."

That change, Banks writes, "shows how places, people, and things of the past go from active to static—from a real-life person possessing the tavern you frequent to a place that is interesting because it used to be a place like that."

It's hard not to think of several versions of this scenario right here in Salt Lake City. Like when the Bar X group—celebrity resident Ty Burrell and his family members—bought Cotton Bottom Inn, a popular haunt for skiers and snowboarders to get burgers and pints after a day up the canyon. A Fox13 article from 2020 describes their remodel as modest: "On the inside, vintage signs and pictures of previous honors reflect the bar's rich history," with the original tables and bar left intact, along with the cook of 23 years.

The bar's new name? The Cotton Bottom.

There are other local examples: Franklin Avenue on Edison Street, a new restaurant in an old building that calls back to the street's old name. Across the street in another old brick building, The Mayor Voss, a trendy new bar which calls back to the area's Black history and an iconic leader from that past.

Also see: The entire Granary District, where industrial-chic businesses invite a detached romanticism—it's fun to drink a craft beer surrounded by 100-year-old brick, less so to consider the manual labor that used to be done there.

In modern cities, we are always being advertised to: The billboards on the freeway and ads on our phones look the same; the new apartment buildings with leasing signs look the same; the amenities they offer, variations on the same. We crave real experiences, real places. People in business and real estate know this, and sell the sturdier, more picturesque, maybe even already popular parts of our cities back to us, with tweaks that tap that desire for realness.

The past and all its symbols—real, aged exposed brick, reclaimed wood, rust-iron girders, the grime embedded into your local dive since it opened in '48—are the crème de la crème for tapping realness in a modern world where authenticity feels elusive.

And can you blame anyone for picking the business in the restored industrial building over the one in the beige stucco five-over-one that shot up in months?

This is also why places that already have that organic patina of age and realness, like Bradley's Tavern, aren't safe from the vintage rebrand. Interesting places with history can be super old or relatively new, like a strip mall mom-and-pop taqueria, a crusty all-ages venue down an alley, or a greasy spoon with shadowy ownership (Publik Ed's, née Big Ed's, anyone?). We like these places as they are. They get popular—and when they get popular, investors see opportunity in that neighborhood. Money changes hands, renovations start and finish, and your old favorite spot is now some version of The Spot, with other new or rebranded spots popping up around it.

Call it gentrification, or have fun with it and call it the "theme park-ification" of cities—everything calls back to a theme, everything must feel like an experience. And what do we do with our experiences? We post them online, we make them into content.

When brunch is as much about eating as it is posting about it on your Instagram grid, or when a weekend running around town and grabbing drinks with friends becomes a personalized life tour for TikTok, savvy businesses will do their best to make their real life place appealingly postable. A place with a vintage vibe—or the manufactured grime and quirks of some established place—looks authentic, and it adds a sense of realness to your grid, to your life.

You may be wondering why this matters. Who cares if a few old buildings become semi-corny, fake-old eateries, pubs and "speakeasys?" It matters because what's lost when investment sniffs out a popular neighborhood is not just the original vibe that made it good to begin with, but also smaller-scale economic empowerment.

As Banks puts it in his book, "instead of a single person owning one bar, a local celebrity is adding a down-market product to his portfolio of high-end establishments."

The bad part, besides this collecting of cultural places-as-real estate,, is also that when a place gets popular and attracts investment, the rent goes up. When the rent goes up, smaller businesses can't always afford to stay, and what comes in their place are the only businesses that can—corporate chains.

The Aster apartments downtown interestingly included a restoration of the historic flower shop, Cramer House, as part of their development. It will soon house two bars, a pub called Carmer House and a cocktail bar called The Florist. So, add "historically housed bar" to your list of fun apartment amenities.

These developments look and act like historical preservation for preservation's sake, but it's hard to shake the feeling that it's just a shiny gimmick, meant to get our attention. It's attention that is at the core of The City Authentic, which heavily informs these observations (go read it!). And it's attention that is also at the core of how Salt Lake City is being built, remodeled and rebranded right now.

Private Eye is off this week.

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