The south side Salt Lake City
A farm that became a park, and a prison that became one
Liberty Park and Sugar House.
Eighty acres the city bought from Brigham Young's estate in 1881, with a mill on it from 1852 and a house from 1854. Two miles southeast, a neighbourhood named for a sugar works that never made sugar, built around a hundred and ten acre park that was the state prison until 1951. Two of the best walks in the city, and neither of them looks like its own history.
Southern Utah is my home turf. Salt Lake City is not, so these pages are researched rather than lived: checked against city, county and venue sources, and dated so you can see how fresh they are. For the on-the-ground work here I lean on a Salt Lake County partner agent.
Start here
Eighty acres the city bought from a dead man's estate in 1881.
Liberty Park is eighty acres in the middle of the south side, and it was a farm long before it was a park. The ground came out of the 1847 Big Field Survey as Isaac Chase's lot. Chase built a mill on it between 1848 and 1852 and finished the house in 1854, both of which are still standing, which makes them among the oldest buildings in the city that you can walk up to.
In 1860 Chase traded the property to Brigham Young, who planted mulberry for a silk venture and cottonwood for shade. Some of those trees are the reason the park's canopy is what it is. After Young's death the city bought the ground from his estate in 1881 for 27,500 dollars and dedicated it as a public park on 17 June 1882.
Everything else accumulated on top of that. Greenhouses in 1903, a grandstand in 1911, the aviary in 1938, and a restoration of the Chase house between 1999 and 2001. The park you walk today is a hundred and forty years of decisions layered over a farm, which is why it does not read like anything designed at once.
Liberty Park in numbers
80
acres, bought from an estate in 1881
1852
the year the mill was finished
1938
the year the aviary opened
1911
the year a zoo opened in the park
Two things inside the park
A folk art museum and a fountain that gave up its water.
The Chase Home in the middle of the park has been the permanent home of the Utah State Folk Arts Collection since 1987, and it is described as the only museum in the country dedicated to displaying a state owned collection of contemporary folk art made by that state's own residents. That is a genuinely unusual proposition: not historic craft behind glass but work made now, by people living here, from traditions carried in. It is free, it is small, and most people walking the park loop have no idea it is open.
The Seven Canyons Fountain is the other one, and its story is the most honest thing in this park. It was built in 1993, donated by O.C. Tanner and designed by Stephen Goldsmith as a walkable scale model of the seven canyons that drain into the valley, with water running the courses. Children played in it for a generation. The water was shut off in 2017 on health grounds and stayed off.
In March 2023 the city decided against restoring the flow, after a study put the cost of doing it properly at two to four million dollars and the draw at twenty one thousand gallons a day. In a valley watching its lake shrink, that arithmetic did not survive contact with daylight. What happened next is the interesting part: rather than fence it off, the city rebuilt it as a dry landscape.
It reopened in October 2025 as the Seven Canyons Refuge, at a cost of 857,968 dollars from the capital improvement programme, with Goldsmith back on the design. The canyon topography is still there and still walkable, now as stone and planting rather than as running water. A great many listings still describe it as closed. It is open, and it is dry by design rather than by neglect.
Two to four million dollars and twenty one thousand gallons a day was a bill this valley stopped being able to justify.
The birds, and the elephant
One collection stayed and one left over a fence.
Tracy Aviary occupies a corner of the park and opened to the public on 2 July 1938, after the banker Russell Lord Tracy handed over his private bird collection along with a trust fund to keep it going. It started at four acres and now covers about eight, at 589 East 1300 South, and it is described as the oldest and largest of only two free standing aviaries in the United States. Free standing is the operative phrase: almost every other bird collection in the country sits inside a zoo.
Which brings us to the zoo that used to be here. The Utah Zoological Society was founded in 1911 on a small plot inside Liberty Park, and by the 1920s it had a problem with a name. Princess Alice was an elephant bought from a travelling circus in 1916, and she developed a habit of getting out of her enclosure and wandering along 7th East, on at least one occasion returning wearing laundry taken off neighbourhood clotheslines.
That is the actual reason the zoo moved. The Hogle family donated 42 acres at the mouth of Emigration Canyon in 1931, the main building was dedicated on 31 July 1931, and fourteen thousand people came through the gates the following day. The zoo has been on the east bench ever since. The birds stayed in the park, and the two collections have been three miles apart for ninety odd years because of one determined elephant.
Two miles southeast
A neighbourhood named for a factory that never made any.
Sugar House is named after a sugar works that failed. The Deseret Manufacturing Company set up in a former blacksmith shop in 1853 under Philip DeLaMare to make sugar out of locally grown beet, and Margaret McMeans Smoot is credited with suggesting the name. More than twenty two thousand bushels of beet were ground and pressed. The syrup that came out was not edible. The venture was abandoned by 1855, and the name stuck to the district for the next hundred and seventy years.
The monument at the crossroads commemorates it, and it has its own layered history. Millard Fillmore Malin proposed it to the Sugar House Business Men's League in 1928 for two thousand dollars, worked on it with Edward Anderson and Lorenzo Young, and it was dedicated on 11 November 1934. The plaza it stands on is older still: it was built in 1914 when 2100 South was realigned and Parley's Creek was put into a conduit underneath, and rebuilt in 1927 at a cost of 5,219 dollars.
So the crossroads that defines this neighbourhood is a monument to a failed factory, standing on a plaza built over a buried creek. That is a fair description of how Sugar House works generally: nothing here is quite what the surface says it is, and the good stories are all one layer down.
The park with a past
A hundred and ten acres of former state prison.
This is the single fact about Sugar House that changes how the place looks once you know it, and almost nothing on the ground announces it.
Sugar House Park was the Utah territorial and then state prison, from January 1855 until 12 March 1951, when 575 inmates were moved south to the point of the mountain. Brigham Young picked the site in 1853 specifically because it was about six miles out of the city, which in 1853 was genuinely remote and is now a mile from a light rail stop.
Taking it down was harder than expected. Nine sticks of dynamite barely dented the walls, and sections had to come apart stone by stone. The keys were handed to Mayor Earl Glade in October 1953, and on 16 July 1957 the ground was conveyed in trust to the Sugar House Park Authority for ninety nine years, a term that ends on 31 December 2055. Highland High School stands on part of the same former prison land.
What you get today is a bowl of open lawn with a pond at the bottom, one of the best sledding hills in the city on the north side, and a road loop that fills with walkers every evening. One thing it no longer has is the Independence Day fireworks show, which was discontinued in 2018, so do not plan a Fourth of July around it.
Half a mile west, at the other end of the same watershed, Hidden Hollow is the counter argument to everything the rest of this companion says about buried creeks. It is about half an acre of daylighted Parley's Creek running under 2100 East to connect with Sugar House Park, and it exists because schoolchildren campaigned for it in the 1990s. It was placed under a conservation easement with Utah Open Lands in May 2000. Half an acre is not much. It is also the only piece of this system that a group of children personally saved.
Nine sticks of dynamite barely dented the walls, so they took it apart stone by stone.
How it connects
Two miles of streetcar on an abandoned freight line.
| The thing | The numbers | Where it stands in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| The S-Line streetcar | Opened 8 December 2013, two miles, seven stops | About 1,246 average daily riders in 2024, on an old Denver and Rio Grande Western corridor |
| What it cost | About 55 million dollars | Including 26 million in federal money awarded in October 2010 |
| The extension | About a quarter of a mile, 43.6 million dollars | Construction began June 2026, service projected for summer 2027 |
| The greenway | A linear park the length of the line | Walking and cycling path beside the track, and the main reason locals use the corridor |
| Westminster University | Founded 1875, 27 acre campus | Renamed from Westminster College in 2023, just over 1,100 students, 150 years in March 2025 |
| Parley's Historic Nature Park | 87 acres at 2667 Heritage Way | A ten acre fenced off leash area written into city code in 2011, commonly miscalled Tanner Park |
The extension runs east toward Highland Drive and Simpson Avenue, which is the part of Sugar House the streetcar has always stopped short of. Construction is live as this is written, so expect closures around the corridor and check the transit authority's own pages before planning a journey on it.
Parley's Historic Nature Park and Tanner Park are two different places, and the dog rules differ. The 87 acre nature park at the mouth of Parley's Canyon carries a ten acre fenced off leash area that was written into city code in 2011, and it is the reason half the valley drives there at the weekend. Tanner Park is a separate adjoining county park, and dogs are not permitted in its bicycle area. People use the two names interchangeably and then get told off. Check which ground you are actually standing on, and note that the creek running through it is the same Parley's that disappears into a conduit under the Sugar House monument two miles downstream.
Keep reading
More of Salt Lake City on The Local.
Things to do
The top 12, ranked
Twelve picks, ranked, with what each costs and the day it actually works on.
Read the guideThe founding block
Temple Square
Forty years to build, shut since 2019, and a 2027 open house you can already diary.
Read the guideThe high ground
The Avenues and the east bench
A grid that breaks the city's grid, a 250 acre cemetery, and a canyon on odd days.
Read the guideThe spine
City Creek and Main Street
A creek daylighted through a mall, a roof that opens, and an 1864 shop front.
Read the guideThe warehouses
The Granary District
Grain silos, a brewery that took back an 1884 name, and the block with the murals.
Read the guideThe garden
Red Butte and the foothills
A state arboretum, a concert lawn, and a canyon behind it nobody may walk into.
Read the guideThe New SLC
The airport
The first new hub airport this century, four miles out, and that walk to A West.
Read the guideAfter dark
Nightlife and the liquor rules
What the state sells, what the shop sells, and the pour limit written into code.
Read the guideMoving here
Living with the inversion
What the bench buys you in January, and what it costs you in the driveway.
Read the guideThe companion
Salt Lake City, in full
The founding block, the bench, the spine, the warehouses and the season, in one place.
Read the pageQuick answers
The south side, answered.
The park was dedicated on 17 June 1882, after the city bought the ground from Brigham Young's estate in 1881 for 27,500 dollars. The land itself is older as a working property: it came out of the 1847 Big Field Survey as Isaac Chase's lot, Chase built the mill between 1848 and 1852 and finished the house in 1854, and Young took the property in a trade in 1860 and planted the mulberry and cottonwood that shape the canopy today.
Yes, and it is dry on purpose. The water was shut off in 2017 on health grounds, and in March 2023 the city decided against restoring the flow after a study put the cost at two to four million dollars and the draw at twenty one thousand gallons a day. It reopened in October 2025 as the Seven Canyons Refuge, a dry landscape built for 857,968 dollars with the original designer back on the project. The canyon topography is still walkable. Many listings still describe it as closed.
The permanent home of the Utah State Folk Arts Collection since 1987, housed in the 1854 Chase family home in the middle of the park. It is described as the only museum in the country dedicated to displaying a state owned collection of contemporary folk art made by that state's own residents, which means work being made now by people living here rather than historic craft behind glass. It is free, it is small, and most people walking the park loop never go in.
It opened to the public on 2 July 1938, after the banker Russell Lord Tracy handed over his private bird collection along with a trust fund to run it. It began at four acres and now covers about eight, in a corner of Liberty Park at 589 East 1300 South, and it is described as the oldest and largest of only two free standing aviaries in the United States. Free standing is the key phrase, because nearly every other bird collection in the country sits inside a zoo.
Yes, from 1911. The Utah Zoological Society began on a small plot inside the park, and it left in 1931 largely because of an elephant. Princess Alice, bought from a travelling circus in 1916, kept escaping her enclosure and wandering along 7th East, on at least one occasion returning wearing laundry taken from neighbourhood clotheslines. The Hogle family donated 42 acres at the mouth of Emigration Canyon in 1931 and fourteen thousand people visited the day after the main building was dedicated.
Because of a sugar works that never produced sugar. The Deseret Manufacturing Company set up in a former blacksmith shop in 1853 under Philip DeLaMare to process locally grown beet, with Margaret McMeans Smoot credited for the name. More than twenty two thousand bushels were ground and pressed, the syrup proved inedible, and the venture was abandoned by 1855. The name attached itself to the district and has stayed for a hundred and seventy years.
It was. The Utah territorial and then state prison stood on that ground from January 1855 until 12 March 1951, when 575 inmates were moved to the point of the mountain. Brigham Young chose the site in 1853 because it was about six miles out of the city. Demolition was difficult: nine sticks of dynamite barely dented the walls and sections came apart stone by stone. The ground was conveyed in trust to the Sugar House Park Authority on 16 July 1957 for ninety nine years, ending 31 December 2055.
About half an acre of daylighted Parley's Creek beside the Sugar House business district, connecting under 2100 East to Sugar House Park. It exists because local schoolchildren campaigned to save it in the 1990s, and it was placed under a conservation easement with Utah Open Lands in May 2000. It is small, and it is the only stretch of Salt Lake City's buried creek system that a group of children personally rescued from a culvert.
A two mile, seven stop streetcar that opened on 8 December 2013 along an abandoned Denver and Rio Grande Western freight corridor between South Salt Lake and Sugar House, built for about 55 million dollars including 26 million in federal money awarded in October 2010, and carrying about 1,246 average daily riders in 2024. An extension of roughly a quarter of a mile east toward Highland Drive and Simpson Avenue, costing 43.6 million dollars, began construction in June 2026 with service projected for summer 2027.
Two parks, two histories, and a very different pair of addresses.
Liberty Park and Sugar House are three miles apart and they are not the same decision: one is a dense central grid built out a century ago, the other is a business district still adding transit and rebuilding blocks. Which one suits you comes down to the street rather than the neighbourhood name. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with a Salt Lake County partner agent who works both.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.