Vendor vision was idealistic

It's been more than 16 years since hopeful hordes packed the City-County Building in downtown Salt Lake City, anxious for a shot at the city's latest idea to revitalize downtown — street vending.

Politicians come up with interesting ideas from time to time. This one came with a lot of Norman Rockwell-like images. The folks occupying elected offices at the time told me they imagined bags of warm, newly roasted chestnuts being sold to passers-by on frosty fall evenings. They painted scenes that mixed comfort food with comfortably idyllic urban coziness, conjuring scenes of two lovers approaching Central Park in some old black-and-white movie, the vendor an unobtrusive but necessary prop.

In those pre-Olympics, pre-TRAX, pre-City Creek Center development days, some people believed the only thing missing from a sagging central business district was food from a cart. Allow these and the people would come.

And people did come — at least to the drawing held on April 4, 1991, to determine which vendors would get which territories downtown. More than 80 would-be sellers showed up. The woman who won first pick chose the corner of 100 South and Main Street. She was so excited she was shaking.

One city planner had a more realistic view at the time. He told me city officials in Washington and New York had warned "just to stay away from it, that it's a Pandora's box." He also said he had spent two years trying to persuade downtown merchants to go along. The Chamber of Commerce finally endorsed vendors, but not unanimously.

Now those heady days are long gone. Today, the street vendors who survive tend to be minorities selling ethnic foods, and they occupy strategic places at strategic times. The city, far from viewing vendors as the romantic missing link to a vibrant city core, just passed an ordinance that pushes them closer to extinction. The city is trying to reduce the smells and messes it says the carts produce. And from now on, vendors must have signed bathroom agreements with nearby businesses. That is to address complaints that vendors and their customers urinate and defecate in doorways or parking lots of adjacent businesses.

Smells and messes? Raw sewage in doorways? Holy frijoles! I don't remember that Norman Rockwell image.

The ordinance also requires some vendors to provide parking. In addition, before any new license is granted a vendor, businesses within 660 feet and property owners within 330 feet must be notified.

I'm guessing that long-ago truce between the brick-and-mortar merchants and vendors is gone.