Regent Street's Vibrant Reformation: Tucked behind the Eccles Theater is a food alley that is not to be missed.

AuthorBeers, Heather

Just an hour before the first overture notes ascend from the orchestra pit, theatergoers sil at a contemporary counter next door, noshing on gold potato gnocchi with langoustines and Pink Pine pizza-a surprising confluence of fennel sausage, leek, and shishito pepper wood-fired to perfection in a Valoriani oven.

Chef Michael Richey's Fireside was the first restaurant to debut on Salt Lake City's Regent Street last year. The eatery is part of an overall reinvention of the alley that now exists behind the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Theater, a downtown thoroughfare connecting the Gallivan Plaza and City Creek Center. The street has been reimagined to add luster to this section of downtown. In a previous life, Regent Street was no more than a dank corridor flanking a parking structure and the defunct printing presses for Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune.

REPLACING BROTHELS WITH BURGERS

Looking farther back, the avenue reveals a more storied past. According to Utah Humanities, from the late 1800s to early 1900s, the street (originally named Commercial Street) was the center of Utah's Chinatown, with restaurants, grocery stores, and a joss house where the immigrant community could worship. The Utah Division of State History reports that the street was also home to two brothels, which The Salt Lake Tribune then called "a resort of gamblers and fast women."

With the advent of the Eccles Theater development, civic, and business leaders saw an opportunity to do something with the street behind the playhouse, to take it beyond a mere access point for the theater loading dock and parking structure. That's why, early on, VODA Landscape + Planning was brought on to the project to help steer Regent Street planning in the right direction.

"The city wanted to use the theater to energize a street that everyone saw a lot of potential for," says Mark Morris, VODA principal landscape architect/urban designer. "We started peeling back all the layers, and we found out Regent Street has this fascinating history that could be told. ... Regent Street is a microcosm of the American West. The Chinese immigrants that lived there, the red-light district; it was home to the Pony Express--all these interesting things that had happened on Regent Street over time had gotten demolished or forgotten. With the design, we wanted to bring a lot of that back. We wanted to tell a story that wouldn't be told anywhere else."

THE GHOSTS OF OUR PAST LIVE ON

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