Quote:
Originally Posted by bob rulz
The two main shopping centers in Sugarhouse in all of their chain store glory have been around since the 90s.  |
Your point?
The two shopping centers have nothing to do with my post. Even when they came in the 1990s, SugarHouse still had a bevy of unique shops and stores that you really couldn't find very often in Salt Lake. Guess what? Those shops are gone - forced out by the development on the corner of 2100 South and Highland Drive many years ago.
Do you know, in 2001, over 90% of the stores on, or around, that block were locally-owned businesses? Shops like the Christian Science Reading Room, Cockers, Haight, The Free Speech Zone, Orion's Music, Wizards and Dreams and multiple others.
Today? In just that little area, there's only a handful of local shops and restaurants and even fewer shops and restaurants that are just unique to the neighborhood.
SugarHouse has lost a good amount of its vibe and big reason for this is because The Vue made it impossible for these other places to operate once it was built.
I don't like the SugarHouse shopping plazas. So, I am not sure if you somehow believe I do but I find them tacky, ugly and auto-centric. But at least I could reason that SugarHouse still had that one block that separated it from basically every other neighborhood in the Salt Lake Valley outside, 9th and 9th, with its total uniqueness.
The shopping plazas aside, SugarHouse was really the only place in the metro that had the type of vibe you'd get in a hip neighborhood in a major US city. It was an experience so foreign to a good amount of what we have in Utah and it's completely gone - gutted.
Now we've got Buffalo Wild Wings and Cubbys! Hooray! I'm just glad they haven't decided to go in and renovate the north-end of 2100 South because the second they do, you know those unique shops are going to be forced out, as well. And frankly, with how the growth is going in SugarHouse, I absolutely expect that will be the next step. That whole block west of Wells Fargo is filled with older, smaller buildings - just like the block where The Vue is now.
I'm sure they're gunnin' to demolish those buildings and develop another monstrosity so we can get a Chili's and an In-N-Out Burger into the neighborhood!
