About 100 people gathered Wednesday night at the Glendale-Mountain View Community Learning Center to give their list of priorities for the soon-to-be Glendale Regional Park — formerly the site of the Seven Peaks waterpark.
The waterpark closed in 2018 and has sat vacant since. Now, the Salt Lake City Public Lands Department is in the process of developing a vision plan for the 17-acre site.
The city has released two concept plans that include features like an outdoor skating rink, a pool, a lazy river and a multi-use sports court. The first is dubbed “the great outdoors" and the other "Glendale green."
The great outdoors emphasizes connections to the Jordan River and capitalizes on environmental restoration. The Glendale Green incorporates gathering spaces and has vibrant areas of play and activity for adults and children.
Nancy Monteith, a senior landscape architect for Salt Lake Corporation, said they have an initial budget of $3.2 million for phase one. She said they’ve been working closely with residents to better understand the needs of the community.
“In particular, we started with kids at the Glendale Middle School and asked them to generate ideas about what we should do with the site,” Monteith said. “They came up with a full range of options from skateboarding, bike trails, a pool or a splash pad, pollinator gardens, to an urban forest.”
Glendale Community Chair Turner Bitton said there’s a lot of potential in this park but he wants the city to be careful of planning around a regional audience instead of the local one. Bitton said his concern stems from people in the neighborhood being displaced by residential developments that have appeared in the area.
“If we just build and we copy and paste the same development pattern from other parts of the city, we will lose what people love about Glendale,” he said. “I think when I look at Raging Waters and some of these big projects like that, they are a great way of really capturing the needs [of the community], the culture, just the experience of people here in Glendale.”
Charles Hosea lives in the neighborhood; his family grew up in the area. He said there is a great need in his community to have pickleball courts where they can play and socialize with family.
Hosea and several of his friends said it’s not just a game for the elderly — it’s become a popular sport for all age groups in recent years.
“We have a community who is going elsewhere to actually enjoy the recreational activity. [Over to] Sugarhouse Park, over at Murray Park,” he said. “We're going to these distances, looking for available courts so that we can play. But we would like to actually just enjoy it right here in our backyard.”
Other residents, like Melanie Pehrson Noyce, also a member of the Glendale Community Advisory Committee for the park, said she’d love to have a place where she can take her kids to play in nature. She said there’s a lot of excitement about a potential splash pad or a pool.
Monteith said they will have the first stage open by 2024. The survey to give input for the vision of the park will close on April 16.
