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| The current weather at Saltair Beach |
| I've been gone from Utah for many years now, but in my dreams I still see this incredible place. Going west from Salt Lake City on old U.S. 40 into the desert, at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, you'd see Saltair rise, a pink hump on the right, looming larger as you pushed on towards the distant desert peaks. Fifteen miles west of Salt Lake, Old 40 hooks sharply left. Railroad tracks long unused crossed the roadway, merging into what had been a pier almost four-fifths of a mile long. At its end, beached in alkali flat that was once water four feet deep, the pavilion sat in eerie glory. Weird and desolate, especially at sunset, the odd combination of Moorish, Arabesque, and World's Fair Slob Art Architecture...a jewel of a derelict pleasure palace on stilts. |
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| Created by the Mormon Church in 1893 as a family recreation destination close to the state capital, conveniently at the end of track of the Salt Lake & Los Angeles Railway, Saltair was for many years one of Utah's most visible attractions. A railroad pier was built out into the Great Salt Lake and a pavilion, something between an Eastern Orthodox church and Arabian Nights palace, was erected at its end. Hundreds of bathhouses were built to introduce visitors to a bathing experience that was, to say the least, unique: water with a salt content of 27% meant that bathers would float on it rather than sink. |
| By 1910, fire and wind had taken out the south arm of bathhouses. A huge Ship Restaurant and Hippodrome were constructed in their place and, within a few years, what was in its time the world's largest roller coaster was erected next to them. The lake level rose and fell, and a World War intervened, but Saltair brought in huge crowds year in and year out. Then, on an April afternoon in 1925, a misplaced welding torch and a stiff breeze brought the good times to an end. |
| Saltair was rebuilt in 1926, bigger but not really better, hanging on through the Great Depression, closed during another World War and staggering through postwar droughts of both money and water. In 1957 the roller coaster died in a microburst, and after one more year Saltair closed for good. This was the Saltair I knew firsthand... the Saltair of the schlock horror movie classic "Carnival of Souls"..rotting wood, broken glass, collapsed staircases... and always, the smell of the lake, the stganation of the swimming pool dredged years earlier, littered with half-submerged dodge-'em cars. In the late fall of 1970, fire came again, and Saltair vanished into the rubble of smoldering steel, asphalt and ashes, with only headstone-like piling stumps to mark its grave. |
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| Turn back to a more distant yesterday. Page through this site with me, and visit this haunting and romantic lost Xanadu, steeped in local baloney, that was the "Coney Island of the West"... The train is waiting down at the old Depot on North Temple and 11th West. It's 15 Cent Day and the ladies are admitted free. The Giant Racer, gone more than fifty years, will again roar out over the greyish lake water. Tonight, it's dinner in the cafe, dancing to Jan Garber or Ted Fio Rito as the last crescent moon sets beyond Stansbury Island to the west, and if you're very fortunate, a smooch from your true love at the stroke of midnight, before the last train heads home. Saltair opens today. Welcome to Saltair Beach... Welcome to Utah's lost Pleasure Palace on Stilts! |
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| New! The Original Saltair Site Today |
| Visit BonnevilleMariner's spectacular Saltair photo album by clicking the link below: |
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