This summer, the market is only operating on lower Main Street, north of Heber Avenue. Additionally, the pandemic-era program that made Main Street pedestrian-only on Sundays is no longer.
Those reductions are largely due to the opposition from the Historic Park City Alliance, a group of business and property owners in Old Town.
Last year, the group sent a survey to the city council showing that roughly two-thirds of respondents didn’t want the market to continue. Nearly half of the group said they also wanted car-free Sundays to end.
Based on that direction, the city council decided to negotiate a smaller footprint with the market as it approved a one-year contract extension. The Silly Market has also cut some dates from its schedule, including the Sunday before July 4.
At the HPCA monthly meeting Tuesday, executive director Ginger Wicks said the response so far has been generally positive, outside of one art gallery on lower Main Street that has decided to close on Sundays.
Monty Coates, who is the new president of HPCA and owner of Southwestern Expressions near the top of Main, said he prefers the ability to park on Main Street because he said it increases foot traffic.
“The problem with the Silly Market is there are winners and losers,” Coates said. “The losers are some of the residents that feel the impacts, the businesses on the south end of the street all feel impacts, because they see reduced revenues during the Silly Market. So it doesn’t universally bring incremental business to the whole town. It brings incremental business to a few people that might be in the right area near it, in my opinion.”
Despite those feelings, Coates said events are important to drive people to Old Town. He, along with several other members of the group, said they miss the customers the Triple Crown baseball tournament brought.
In 2021 amid concerns about overcrowding, the city council decided not to renew a contract with Triple Crown, which regularly brought thousands of visitors to Park City during the two-week tournament in late July.
Park City Lodging President and Founder Rhonda Sideris said they are seeing significant declines in bookings for the summer. She said that’s industry-wide in tourist destinations throughout the country, citing tighter economic conditions and open borders allowing international travel.
Sideris added that most people are currently looking to book rooms in December.
Regarding Park Silly Sunday Market, the HPCA plans to meet with event organizers to find a compromise on how it could look going forward, as the city council considers a new contract.
