You may have noticed there’s a lot of newcomers in town. You may even be one of those newcomers. If so, you probably have some questions about your new home state. We have answers. We consider Salt Lake magazine an essential resource for navigating life here in Utah. We write about food, culture, travel, history, nightlife, issues and outdoor fun with the goal of guiding you to the best of life in the Beehive. We even have a regular piece on the last page called Utah Field Guide (“The Grid System”) to explain the quirks and peculiarities that often perplex the newly arrived. In this issue, we decided to kick it up a notch with our cover story, “The Secrets of Salt Lake City.”
The feature sprang from the pages of a book I and our late editor Mary Brown Malouf wrote called Secret Salt Lake City (Reedy Press, 2021). It’s a guidebook for both longtime Salt Lakers and you newcomers. We collected a selection of “secrets” (that really aren’t so secret) and there was no shortage of material. Utah is weird, right?
The longtime Salt Lake Tribune columnist and law-enforcement historian Robert Kirby once told me what he loved about knowing the history of where we live. “I can look out into a field and it is just a field,” he said. “But if I know what happened on that spot 50, 100, even a 1,000 years ago it’s more than a field.”
We walk around the city and a street is just a street, but if you knew the history? Well, that’s when things get interesting. Our cover story plucks out a selection of the juicer secrets from the book that we hope will peel back the hidden layer of secrets and stories that are just waiting to be seen. Now get out there and discover them for yourself.
This editor’s letter was published in our September/October 2021 issue. Read the cover story and subscribe to the magazine.
