Since then, about every 10 years there is a movement to clean up the park up and make it a family-friendly place once again or to sell it to private industry. But those efforts always seem to fade away

Salt Lake City Mayor Earl Glade appeared to be on the verge of selling the park in the late 1940s to early 1950s.

"It's not in the public interest for the city to hold that park when it could be part of tremendous value as an industrial site," Glade said in a newspaper article from 1950. Glade eventually changed his mind because the majority of citizens were against any type of sale.

In 1955, Sons of Utah Pioneers made the first of what would become many proposals to rebuild the fort.

In 1966, an architect drew up plans to have the old fort rebuilt and turn the park into a tourist attraction with wagon trains and horses inside the walls. That idea was kept alive in 1971 when Gov. Cal Rampton appointed a study commission to look at the idea of building the fort replica. A 1996 column printed in the Deseret News again looked at the idea of rebuilding the compound.

In 1958, there was a proposal to build a 10,000-seat amphitheater in the park, and another time there was a proposal to turn it into a golf course.

The park was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and was officially declared a city landmark in 1976.

Before Real Salt Lake, there was the controversy over where Salt Lake City should build a baseball stadium. In the early 1990s, Mayor Deedee Corradini was looking very closely at the area just southeast of Pioneer Park, referred to by city planners simply as Block 42, as the site for the new stadium.

The Rio Grande Neighborhood Coalition even held a celebration in 1994 for its "success" in regaining control of the park from drug dealers. That same year, the City Council approved a nighttime curfew at the park. An article from the Deseret News in 1994 read like something out of today's paper or even 1984: "Police have launched another effort to clean up Pioneer Park. This time they say they're serious."

Just two years later, Corradini closed the entire park for three weeks to clean it up.

There were proposals over the years to change the name of Pioneer Park to Pioneer Square to allow restaurants in the area to serve alcohol. Until 2003, state law prohibited alcohol from being served within 600 feet of a park.

This past September, the new Guardian Angels Salt Lake chapter patrolled the park as part of a training exercise.

Burbank stresses the drug problem at the park is not simply a "transient problem." He does not deny there are some people living at the shelter who are addicted to drugs and help fuel the demand. But officers see residents from all over the area, from all income brackets, travel down to the park to buy drugs.

"I've seen guys buying dope with their 2-year-old kid in the back seat," Ross said. "It makes me sick."

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E-mail: preavy@desnews.com