The proposal to redevelop the corner now occupied by the Yarrow Hotel is back in play. That’s happened before, but this time, I think they mean it.
The hotel, now a Hilton-Doubletree franchise, began life as a Holiday Inn. At the time, that was a big deal. Huge.
Not that Holiday Inn was a prestigious brand — the St. Regis it’s not — but at the time it was built, it was important. Park City skiing was still in its adolescence, not much over a decade old. It was struggling to find traction in the national market. We had the best airport access of any resort in the country, but Utah skiing unknown on the national scene. Ah, the good old days.
The arrival of the Holiday Inn was nothing short of validation. A national chain considered us worthy of putting one of their franchised hotels here. It offered a national reservation system, and a franchise-level assurance of the quality of the rooms. We had a toe in the big leagues.
The options before were local operations. The original Silver King motel was a cinder block affair with a good location and no charm. There was the Chateau Apres, little changed from those early days, and the Blonquist family from Coalville had a motel here. But now, we had: A Holiday Inn!
To this day, I still call it the Holiday Inn, but then I also sometimes slip and call the market that hasn’t been Albertsons in many years Alpha Beta, which it was originally.
With the latest proposal to scrape it off, I got wondering how old it really was. At 50 years, it could qualify for a National Register of Historic Places listing, at least by age.
In the context of Park City, it also might qualify on the basis of significance. It was the public space of the town. Its ballrooms hosted high school dances and I think graduations at a time when the facilities at the new (since torn down) high school, way out on the edge of town, were limited. Important business meetings were held in the café there, and you could get a pulse on what was happening in the development community by seeing who was having lunch with whom at the Yarrow. It was where deals were made, even if the details were worked out at the Down Under club.
I guessed it was built in about 1973, crossing that 50-year preservation threshold. But I was wrong. I did some digging in the Utah Digital Newspapers, a wonderful resource, and came up with some nuggets of history.
In 1974, Edgar Stern’s Greater Park City Company, which owned pretty much everything in town at that point, sold the land to a local investor group headed up by Rob Morris. The Holiday Inn name was attached to the proposal at that time.
The Park Record reported that Greater Park City Company assured the city that there would be no large neon signs (a standard Holiday Inn feature of the day), and that GPCC had reserved the right to approve the building design. The land, at the time, was an abandoned city ball field, squatting on land formerly owned by the mining company.
Nothing was easy in Park City at that time. Banks mostly wouldn’t lend in town, and the Morris group struggled with financing. In 1977, the city agreed to help out with Industrial Revenue Bonds, which would cover the infrastructure costs. Construction began shortly after, and the Holiday Inn hosted its first overnight guests and a small convention in October 1978. The total cost was $6.5 million.
We had arrived. If Park City was good enough for Holiday Inn, it was good enough for Salt Lake banks to start lending here.
There have been all kinds of proposals on it. One group wanted to sell the individual hotel rooms as condominium units. In 2008 there was a plan to tear it all down and redevelop the site with something fairly similar to the most recent proposal. The current owners, a group out of Chicago with some other investments in the area, made a proposal a couple of years ago that got a pretty flat reception from the Planning Commission.
I don’t know anything about the current proposal beyond what’s been reported. The renderings seem disappointingly ordinary. A step up from Cabrini-Green, and that stacked shipping container style that we will regret in two years, but entirely forgettable.
The site is the most prominent corner in town. It deserves something special. The architectural shortcomings of the Park Avenue Condos have long since been cured by trees. The Top Stop is not exactly what our entry statement should be. The Yarrow site really needs a dramatic building that 50 years from now, locals will be ready to lay down in front of bulldozers to preserve. The Yarrow isn’t that.
It doesn’t matter what’s inside the building — condos, a hotel, affordable housing. It really doesn’t matter much in the overall mix of things.
What does matter is that when you get to that intersection, arriving in Park City, there is a building on that lot that says this town matters to the people who love it. Let’s hope the city can find ways to be a creative partner in getting something special built on that special corner.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.