When the world tunes in to the Winter Olympics, will it like what a $2 billion investment has bought for the host city?

BY SHIRLEY STRESHINSKY

"Imagine Being in Sun Valley 1952," proclaims the first in a series of bright nylon banners leading into one of Utah's deluxe new mountain lodges. The next one adds, "Imagine Owning in Aspen 1972." Then, "Imagine Buying in Vail 1982." The last banner, which is the point of it all, reads, "Imagine Living at The Canyons 2002." The Canyons is a posh new development in the mountains 45 minutes southeast of Salt Lake City. And 2002 is upon us, the year the XIX Winter Olympics come to this north central sector of Utah, rimmed by the Wasatch and the Oquirrh ranges. Change was already under way, filling in the rural spaces between city and resort; the Olympic Games accelerated the pace of development. Imagine what happens to a city of 171,000 and the mountain wilderness surrounding it when it reaches for the global ring.

For the past six years, these Utah valleys, mountains, and canyons have been invaded by flocks of building cranes and hordes of giant yellow earthmovers. They have echoed with the sounds of buzzing saws and the backup beeps of heavy-duty trucks. Mountains have been sliced, the streets of Salt Lake City have been methodically torn up, and neighborhoods have been disrupted in the drive toward the February Olympics deadline.

Opening ceremonies will be held in Salt Lake City on Feb. 8, closing ceremonies on Feb. 24. The city will host figure and short-track skating at its Olympic Skating Arena, but the rest of the 70 medal events will be held at 10 different sites, all within an hour's drive over a network of new highways. Downhill skiing will be at Snowbasin near Ogden to the north, ice hockey at The Ice Sheet at Provo to the south. Other venues include a new $56 million Utah Winter Sports Park carved out of a mountain near Park City, where skiers will jump into space and bobsledders careen down tracks that themselves cost many millions. Sports stadiums have been enlarged and refined, hotels have risen, parking lots have been plowed out until the transformation is complete.

Pumping upward of $2 billion into a place ensures that the landscape will be substantially rearranged, uprooted, and re-routed, forever affecting the historic old in the race to invent a vibrant new. In the case of the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics, the effect of the games on the region's particular (and even peculiar) history offers a few surprises, some of them provocative. Consider a hell-bent-for-leather 19th-century frontier fort seamlessly incorporated into a university campus; a wilderness ski lodge girded by salt-soaked, massive railroad timbers recycled from another century; a brand-new light-rail system expected to revive historic neighborhoods.

For more of this story, see our January/February 2002 issue.