Decided to walk home from work today which is something I feel really lucky to be able to do. I don't live particularly close to work but after commuting 100 miles a day for 5 years I relish bring able to walk to work or home in less time than I used to sit on my arse in a car.
Once again the weather today had a very nor cal, pnw feel to it. 50+ degrees in December? What's up with that?
I walked through the central city neighborhood which isn't nearly as scary as that sounds. SLC even central SLC is a pretty safe city. Random bad stuff happens occasionally but as older cities go its a nice place.
In the middle of central city is the old trolley barns repurposed in the 70s as a shopping mall and updated again last year. Its odd that I just mentioned how relatively safe central city is when five years ago some nut from a eastern European country opened fire with a automatic weapon in the trolley square mall killing a pile if people. But I don't like to think about that. What I like to think about is imagining how things were 100 years ago when these central trolley barns sent out hundreds of trolleys to get people from my the streetcar suburbs a whole 4 miles from downtown into the central business district. There was a complete lack of cars so people walked like me, rode a horse or a trolley... That was it.
A block away is Gilgal a park that was created from the backyard of an eccentric long time Mormon bishop that was a stone mason. He worked on this project for decades making representations of book of Mormon stories and a sphinx with Joseph Smith's head. Any time I walk by I stop in to see the weirdness and I always see something new.
Further up the hill I see some of the original sandstone sidewalks and gutters that were constructed back in the 1890s that are still relatively common around the city. Sandstone slabs were cut from the local canyons and filleted and installed as the first sidewalks which was impressive considering many of the streets in SLC weren't paved for another 40 years.
I continued up the hill past East High known as being the filming location for the Disney high school musical trilogy and following the old trolley grade further up the hill toward home. Incredibly glad I didn't wuss out and take a bus.
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