This past weekend found me enjoying the springtime weather in Salt Lake’s Sugarhouse area, which, for you out-of-towners, is the closest thing to a Bohemian district we have in these parts. Back when I was a student at the nearby University of Utah, it was a run-down pit: eight or ten square blocks of decaying bungalows, boarded-up storefronts, seedy coffeehouses, and leftover head-shops run by guys who hadn’t gotten the memo about the ’60s being over. It was the place you went if you wanted to have your fortune told or your nose pierced. It was probably also the place you went if you wanted to score some weed, although I personally wouldn’t know about that. That was never my thing.
I loved Sugarhouse back then. I loved the mildly disreputable atmosphere, and the heady smells of patchouli and tobacco and old-building mustiness that wafted from open doors. I loved to shop in the weird little holes-in-the-wall where you could buy a statue of Ganesh or a cheap “pre-owned” paperback of On the Road. And I loved to watch all the exotic people: punks, metalheads, flower children, gypsies, derelicts. To a kid from the white-bread suburban frontier of the straightest city in America, it was deliriously cool.
