“In the days before artificial trees and electric lights, there was a special feeling in Park City during the holiday season — a feeling of warmth, friendship and togetherness. Snow clung to the garlands of pine boughs and red ribbons which hung about the glowing windows and doors of Main Street. … As friends and neighbors drew up to a warm fire to share a glass of Christmas cheer, one must have wondered if there were indeed anything else quite like Park City during the holiday season.”
That sounds almost like Dickens, doesn’t it? In fact, the author probably was the editor of this newspaper — “Max C. Jarman, Managing Editor, Advertising,” almost a one-man band. He was writing 44 years ago.
While Christmas in Park City and Park City itself in 1978 would seem almost quaint to us now, so long before the traffic and the mega-development, the million-dollar tear-downs and Sundance, it must have seemed busy and modern then, with its artificial trees and electric lights.
Nostalgia never goes out of fashion. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” — the more things change, the more they stay the same: The French journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr is known almost alone for saying that 173 years ago. Had Karr been given eternal life rather than dying in the same year as Sitting Bull (1890), one supposes he never would have needed to revise it.
Consider that same edition of The Park Record, a weekly then, dated Thursday, Dec. 21, 1978. At the time, Park city’s population was booming, approaching 2,800 people. It had grown from 1,193 people in 1970, an increase of 136.6% for the decade. That is Park City’s second-biggest leap after the growth spurt between 1870 and 1880, which saw an increase from 164 people to 1,542.
And what did the stupendous growth bring in the 1970s? In the Park Record column Park Float for Dec. 21, 1978, which ran under the somewhat improbable byline Woodro Celt, we find this:
“Slowly but surely the fact that it is damn near impossible, and getting harder, to find an inhabitable and affordable place to live in Park City is starting to get the attention it deserves from the city fathers. City Planner Dave Preece’s recent noble suggestion that the city consider a moratorium on allowing conversion of apartments into high-priced ‘condominiums’ is probably doomed, but those optimists among us can hope that the controversy will sow the seeds of some type of action.”
Elsewhere in the same Park Record issue, there is this item: “Ironically, the most prosperous of western ski areas, Aspen, also has the most critical problem with regards to lack of employee housing. Because of it, some employers have reportedly offered employees vacations to Mazitlan (sic), as the bidding war for service workers drove the wages of maid to $12hr. last season.” In today’s money, that’s about $55 an hour.
We seem to spend an awful lot of time staring at the problem of affordable housing and worker housing, and talking about it, without accomplishing much, other than it not getting radically worse. Perhaps that’s in part because Park City keeps growing and the solutions we find, which maintain the status quo, tend to be patches. Mixed developments have some affordable housing along with commercial space, which will mean more workers, who will need housing.
This may be just good enough to keep going, but in the long run, we are going to need bolder thinking about capitalism and fairness.
They were saying that, too, back in the time before artificial trees and electric lights. Only one thing seems sure, as Carly Simon once explained: These are the good old days.