At dusk, heading toward Salt Lake City's downtown urban center of bling, i.e., The Gateway, reflective orange-and-white striped traffic bollards led me on a detour around the backside of muted buildings, over an abandoned railroad track and onto a short but well-worn road.

In the dimly lighted area overlooked by 21st century gentrification, I caught a glimpse of the old city, when downtown was several blocks east. Esther Klein, born in 1906, knew it by heart.

"I don't think [all] the streets were paved then," Esther said in a 1983 interview archived at the University of Utah's Marriott Library. "I can see the old trolley cars, and an old-fashioned dry goods store on Main Street called Cohn Brothers."

Louis and Alexander Cohn, Jewish immigrants from Russian Poland, were early entrepreneurs in the West along with early freight-shipper Nicholas Ransahoff, the Walker brothers and the business-oriented Kahns and Auerbachs.

Active in pubic life, Louis was elected to city council in 1874 and again in 1888. Their ready-to-wear clothes, advertised in January 1885's Salt Lake Herald , pitched colored velvets for $2; black velvets, less; "heavy cloakings, 50 cents on the dollar," and "brocades and silks" below cost.

"They didn't have cash registers in every department," Esther remembered. A pneumatic tube system installed in the balcony whisked cylindrical carriers to various departments.

"A salesman would twist open a

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little container, put the sales slip and money in, and send it up the tube." If change were due, compressed air would send it back down.

One day, after her sister Elizabeth fixed her hair in curls, they walked to the Walker Brothers building for a "tea" party.

"It was some sort of sales gimmick," she said. "Little girls would get dressed up, bring their dolls, and have hot chocolate in the display window. We ended up with a little cup and saucer that I kept for years."

In the summer, the sisters bought sweets at Klein's Bazaar, window shopped at the Paris Millinery on Main Street and for a family excursion, caught the train to Saltair to "bathe in the deep waters on the south side of the railroad tracks."

Young Esther lived in an adobe house on 200 South and West Temple with a single globe light hanging in each of the two rooms and no indoor plumbing. Her father Joseph left Hungary as a teenager. In the 1890s, he picked fruit in Miami orchards and worked the railroad outside Yellowstone National Park. Her mother, arriving at Ellis Island with little but a small trunk and bedding, immediately headed West. They met in Pueblo, Colo., married and relocated to Utah.

"My father was tall, wiry, with thick strawberry-red hair, a mustache only he could trim, and really blue eyes," Esther said. "He was a laborer who did rough work at a smelter but never used rough language around us.

"He believed people should talk American when they were out in public," she said. "But at home, if they didn't want us to understand what they were saying, they spoke in Yiddish, German, Czechoslovakian or Hungarian."

On weekends, the Klein sisters and their older brother watched silent-screen star Pearl White save herself in "The Perils of Pauline" series playing at the Mahesy Theatre above Broadway. They scanned Salt Lake City newspapers and cut out free passes for vaudeville matinees at the old Pantages.

When they moved to 200 East and 600 South, her father attended Congregation Shaarey Tzedek while the others went to Congregation Montefiore. During Yom Kippur, her mother always held the fast. Her father snuck out of services. They understood each other.

"She believed that was his pleasure," Esther said. He'd return "with a sack of grapes" to accompany her break-the-fast sponge cake.

When classmates told Esther she would have to live in Jerusalem because she was Jewish, she was stunned, and said no. "I was born and raised here. Why would I go?"

After all, it was her town.

Eileen Hallet Stone is an oral historian. She wrote A Homeland in the West: Utah Jews Remember, and may be reached at ehswriter@aol.com