The old Granite High School stood for 110 years, but it didn’t take long for the big backhoe to bring the main building down Monday.
In its lifetime, thousands of teachers shaped the minds of many thousands of young people in hopes they would help shape the world. Some of them did. Noted Granite Farmer alum Ed Catmull, for example, is now president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. Not bad.
Then there are those like me, a graduate of the Class of 1991.
I wasn’t what you would call “a good student.” I ran for class office, mostly as a joke, with my buddy Stu, only to win and then get impeached before the year was over. I’d skip seventh period to eat pie and play video games with Sam at the 7-Eleven. And I irritated Coach Goff when I unilaterally decided to post signs renaming the pool the “Robert C. Gehrke Swimming and Diving Complex.”
We could probably all talk about our old high schools like we grew up in some Bruce Springsteen song. There was nothing really special about Granite, except it happened to be the one where we went.
It was the building where we learned about science and math and English and ourselves, the range where we first puttered around in a car, the sports fields and courts where we experienced victory and defeat (mostly defeat), and the place we found our first loves and suffered our first heartbreaks.
But we all packed up our memories and moved on, and the old lady eventually fell into disrepair.
Over the past seven years, there was one attempt to salvage the school after another. An ambitious plan to turn the campus into a community center fell five votes short in a bond election — thanks, I’m convinced, to a handful of ballots that appear to have been cast by people who live in nonexistent residences.
The demolition of Granite High was a long time coming. Still, it was more than a little surreal to watch the old building tumble Monday.
Steve Griffin | The Salt Lake Tribune Bricks from Granite High School are being made available to the public as the school is demolished in Salt Lake City Tuesday July 18, 2017. Bricks can be picked up in the east parking lot o the school.
In its place, it appears, there will be the same kind of mixed-use development that is clogging Sugar House and springing up around the rapidly gentrifying areas of downtown — retail on the ground floor, condos up above and character out the window.
I hear they might even still build a scaled-down version of that Walmart that the South Salt Lake Mayor has fought against.
This is progress, we are told.
My friend has a hypothesis that there’s a segment of Salt Lakers who he calls “The Class of 1995,” those people of our generation who believe the city peaked about that time and refuse to acknowledge that things change, sometimes for the better. Instead we gripe when our favorite haunts are shuttered or torn down.
He’s right, although most days I still feel too young to be a curmudgeon.
But I worry that we are jettisoning our past in pursuit of progress and its IKEA-inspired facades, and in doing so we risk losing more than buildings.
It’s not about Granite High. It’s about demolishing blocks of downtown for pop-up condos, or tearing down Arrow Press Square to maybe build a hotel, or smashing the old Port o’ Call block to build the glass cube that is the federal courthouse, or taking down swaths of Main Street to build shiny new skyscrapers.
It’s true that buildings are just buildings and Granite High was just Granite High. But as we look to this growing city’s future, I hope we don’t simply disregard these touchstones of our past in the pursuit of progress.
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