My Quirky Little State: The Cursed Coney Island in the West

by Adam

The state I call home, Utah, has a violent and bizarre history.  Salt Lake City has, for many years, been a stopover–no one’s destination, not even for the people who live here.  This is the best description of the city I’ve been able to come up with.

Anyway, in this column I teach you an interesting little tidbit of Utah history.  Today we’ll be learning about Saltair.

The original Saltair resort was completed in 1893.  It was one of the first amusement parks in the country, and for a short period of time it was the most popular resort west of New York City.  It was located on the Great Salt Lake, between Salt Lake City and Iosepa, a large community of Polynesian Mormons which would later be abandoned as its citizens moved into Salt Lake City and to the growing Mormon communities in Hawaii.

In 1919, Saltair became home to the world’s largest rollercoaster, The Giant Racer, but in 1925, Saltair was all but completely destroyed in a devastating fire.  The original pilings can still be seen in the Great Salt Lake. Almost immediately, wealthy Mormon investors began building a new Saltair, which opened the following year.  The coming Great Depression, paired with a particularly smelly year for the lake in 1930, all but killed the new Saltair.  Fires hit the resort again in 1931 and 1933, and in 1939 the Giant Racer partially collapsed.  The resort closed at the onset of WWII and stayed that way until 1946.

When Saltair re-opened, it had been all but forgotten.  A new amusement park had been opened just north of Salt Lake City, and more and more people were traveling by car to the many natural attractions Utah has to offer.  In 1951 another fire hit Saltair, destroying the bathhouses and concessions on the north end of the pier, and in 1957 the Giant Racer collapsed to the ground permanently, and pieces of it remained strewn about the beach up until 1970.  In 1959, the owners of Saltair donated it to the State of Utah, which contemplated demolishing it until another fire took all but the main pavilion in 1967.  The main pavilion was destroyed in 1970 when “a fire was set in the middle of the wooden dance floor.”

A Beach Boys album cover, taken at Saltair.

Following expansion in the Tooele Valley (west of Salt Lake City) and the newfound proximity to Interstate 80, Saltair was rebuilt for a third time in 1981.  It was flooded by the lake only months after it opened.  A few years later, the water receded, and investors moved back in to refurbish and replan the resort, only to find that the waters were going to keep receding and leave the lakeside resort high and dry.

Today, Saltair is used occasionally as a concert venue, though nothing really exists there other than a pavilion, some abandoned train cars and the wood pilings of the original Saltair.