The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1893-02-17
HOW TO MAKE RESORTS.
Salt Lake Must Not Expect Nature to
Do 1t All.
If We Have Summer Resorts We Must
Have Resort HoteIs-several Strong
Movements in That Direction.

Wanted!
A hotel at Saltair.
A hotel at Brighton.
hotel at the Hot springs.
A hotel at Warm springs.
Volumes have been written on the Great
Salt Lake as summer resort and sani-
tarium.
| 1t is neither.
With all its Boosting and trumpeting it
has nothing to offer except natural ad
vantages and cubby holes where pleasure
seekers and inyalids can change their
clothes before taking plunge in the
brine or dip in the thermal springs.
The first indispensable thing for a sum-
resort is a hotel, where guests may be
made comfortable during the hot season
and enjoy the luxuries which are afforded
at fashionable places.
A row of wooden bath houses does no
more make summer resort than a jump
ing off place at swimming pond.
Outdoor bathing is only one OF the at
fractions of a summer home. Three
fourths of the summer resorts are without
open air bathing, and the guests do their
cleansing in the hotel bath tubs.
And yet Great Salt Lake relies on bath
ing as the chief attraction, when it is only
an incidental to the pleasure and recre-
alton of such resorts.
When the pioneers settled this valley
forty six years ago there was the same
pure air, thermal springs, snow-capped
mountains and golden sunsets.
What has bean done to make III a sum.
mer resort?
Pools have been dug and walled up at
the Hot and Warm springs and a row of
bath houses built on the edge of the lake,
with dancing pavilion and beer she'd.
No complaint can be made to the facili-
ties afforded for getting into batting cos
tunes and getting out of them. But a
soaking oneself until clean and drying
oneself dry. A toad can hop into the
water and hop out again and sun itself on
log until it is dry.
Fashion is what makes summer resorts.
Hotels make fashion, give it conven-
lent place to luxuriate.
The only summer hotel in Utah, strictly
speaking, is board building at Brighton,
and the dozen or two implanted shanties
that have been dubbed Cottages. - The
primitiveness of Brighton is it's only at
y
mountains with pine and planted dozen
of the prettiest lakes that ever laughed
at the moon or danced in the sun.
! Until there is q hotel at Garfield, another
hotel at Saltair, and another at Beck S
Hot Springs, and mountain house at
Brieh Salt Lake should not lay any
claim to being summer resort, for the
people who come here will always go
saway disappointed at our primitivenes
and laugh at our presumption.
Invalids, of the class who have the
money to travel thousands of miles in
search of health. are fastidiously nice in
their habits and will not put up with bar
room accommodations. If they come for
the baths at the thermal springs, they
must have hotel accommodations. 1t is
preposIerous to expect these people to ex-
pose themselves to the opeL air and the
draught of street or railroad car, after
they have exhausted themselves in the
bath. They always crave their beds and
nap, and as they can have these at other
resorts, they will go elsewhere rather
than stay here.
This is the reason why Salt Lake city,
with four-fold more natural attractions
than any summer resort in America, is
not summer resort at all. The pleasure
seekers pile in and pile out again. There
are not more than few hundred persons
who spend their summers in this city,
when there ought to be 5000. With a
half dozen first class resort hotels, the
merchants and shop people would do a
good business all summer, instead of
looking glum and bewailing the dearth Of
trade.
Happily there are Indications that Salt
Lakes resources of climate are to be util-
lied, and that the wealth of its salt and
thermal waters are to be extracted.
The Hot Springs people have had the
plans for very attractive hotel for year
and the scheme is being revived for its
erection.
Messrs. Barnes g. Byrnes, the proprie-
tors of the warm springs, also promise to
come to the front with fine sanitarium,
| B. K. Bloch.is endeavoriug to secure a
site for new hotel at Garfield beach, and
if he can come to terms with the Union
Pacific company on long lease he will
organize hotel company and go to work.
s The Saltair people have also hotel in
view, but the immense and magnificent
pavilion thay are erecting at such great
cost this year will be about all they will
care TO swing.
Brigham has been accepted as the most
desirable of all spots for mountain re-
sort, and there is movement on foot to
incorporate company, including all the
principal land owners, and erecting a
hotel to cost not less than $50 600.
There should De boom in summer re-
sorts and the first hotel built on the sum-
mer house plan will prove such success
that it will induce others to do likewise.
If bathing places can be made to pay at
all without hotels, who can predict what
they would do if they had hotels and
porches lined with fashionable people,
gayly dressed, giving them the necessary
tone to attract following?
The owners of bathing resorts might as
well understand now (as in ten years from
now that the kind of swim people will
break their necks to get into is the social
swim.
Summer hotels are the generators of
social swims.
The famous column of Trajan is 127 feet
high, composed of thiruy-fou blocks of
marble and sculptured from ton to bot