Park City wants to keep Main Street a tourist destination, especially as ritzy new developments like Deer Valley East Village threaten to steal customers away from the historic district.
Earlier this year Park City launched a committee to develop a Main Street Area Plan, which seeks to establish a vision for the future of the neighborhood.
The committee has discussed several transformational concepts, including parking reductions on Main Street, a new gondola that would connect to Deer Valley’s Snow Park base and significant commercial development along Swede Alley.
The ideas are scheduled to be presented at a public open house next month and the city council could consider adopting the plan by the end of this year.
“It’s not any specific project," councilmember Ryan Dickey, who sits on the committee, said of the plan. "It’s not a shovel in the ground. It’s council saying this is the future vision. This is what we want Old Town to be. This is the experience that we want in Old Town. And then the next step going into next year is, how do we actually go do it?”
Part of the discussions have included talks of building a gondola between the Brew Pub lot at the top of Main Street and Deer Valley’s Snow Park base.
“We have an existing Park City [Mountain] connection at the bottom of Main Street, and then what if you had a really new and enhanced street geometry connecting those two points? That’s a really exciting part of the future vision,” Dickey said.
Dickey emphasized that the committee has not evaluated whether a gondola connection is actually feasible.
To make Main Street a more walkable destination, the committee has also discussed removing parking spaces to make room for more pedestrian space.
“We want to create space on sidewalks, create something that’s walkable, create something that’s more of a destination, and create something that’s stickier,” Dickey said. “So that when our visitors come to Main Street, they stay longer. Because what we see is the best revenue days on Main Street are not the days when there are the most parking transactions. It’s actually days when we have fewer parking transactions, but visitors are coming and staying longer, and they’re also arriving in shared shuttles and on transit.”
To create a new plaza at the center of Main Street, the committee has explored removing the post office building, which is listed on Park City’s historic inventory. Only a small section of the post office dates back to when it was built in 1921. Additions made in the 1960s and 1970s undermined its historic value, and it was subsequently removed from the National Historic Register.
Dickey said the committee has discussed preserving only the 1921 section or demolishing the site altogether.
The Park City Council has a work session focusing on the Main Street plan Nov. 7.
Park City will share more of the plans at an open house at Miners Hospital in City Park Nov. 12, where they also want to hear from residents.
Learn more about the Main Street Area Plan here.
