Tour to explore neighborhood's evolution

Stephen Goldsmith knows this neighborhood. He knows the flower box on the east end of the Pierpont sidewalk used to be a sink in a laboratory at the University of Utah.

He helped plant the trees that now shade the porches behind Artspace. He can remember when the lawn at California Tire was the playground of a day care for homeless children. He knows the name of each artist who painted a mural on the side of a building, and he knows the history of those buildings.

Many of them were built in 1910, when businessmen with the last names of Eccles and Browning funded the construction of large warehouses on Salt Lake City's west side. Goldsmith says the city fathers wanted to encourage farmers to move their produce markets off of Main Street so the capital city would look a little less homespun.

But the farmers didn't bite. And other uses were found for the warehouses. And Goldsmith will talk about this when he leads Jane's Walk. He'll talk about how much better it works when a neighborhood grows organically, from the bottom up instead of from the top down.

Goldsmith is an activist, a sculptor, the former director of planning for Salt Lake City and currently a professor of architecture and planning at the University of Utah as well as the director of the Center for the Living City, an organization dedicated to furthering the ideas of Jane Jacobs.

On Saturday, he will lead a free walking tour of the neighborhood around Pierpont, on Salt Lake City's west side. He plans to walk and talk for 90 minutes, maybe two hours.

He knows he could talk at least that long about this community, where he has had several art studios over the years and where he once lived and raised children. Goldsmith hopes that some of those who join him on the walk will have memories of their own about the neighborhood.

Jane's Walk honors Jacobs, a respected activist and critic of traditional kinds of city planning. Goldsmith counts himself lucky to have known Jacobs for a few years before she died in 2006 at the age of 89.

Jacobs is most well-known for her 1961 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." She loved walkable neighborhoods, with people of all colors and ages living and working in close proximity. One of her most famous quotes is, "New ideas need old buildings."

Jacobs lived in New York City for many years. She spearheaded a drive to save Greenwich Village from "urban renewal."