This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Right now, the Draw at Sugar House is a huge, muddy hole with a start on the infrastructure for a subterranean passage from Sugar House Park to Hidden Hollow.

The project has been in the works since 2003, and now a $450,000 shortfall in funding is threatening the very essence of its design, functionality and its re-creation of a vital moment in Utah's history and culture.

To better understand that vision, I called Patricia Johanson, a widely known environmental designer who lives in upstate New York and created both the vision and the structure of the project.

The first thing she said was that it would be a huge mistake to call the project, with its big sego lily and replication of The Witches rock formation in Echo Canyon, an "art installation."

Rather, it would be a statement on and a history of the landscape, wildlife and waterways that existed before the Mormon pioneers arrived in the valley in 1848. All of those elements still exist, Johanson says, and the design would reveal and restore them.

"Looking at the mountains, Parleys Creek as it snakes its way down, and the last remnant of ravines in Hidden Hollow, reveals a deeper truth beyond the art," she says.

Johanson, who won a National Endowment for the Arts to design the project in 2003, has a degree in architecture and considerable experience working with engineers.

She spent time in Salt Lake City and, most significantly, read the diaries of Erastus Snow, one of the first pioneers to enter the valley.

He recorded crawling through a thicket and hearing a rattlesnake's buzz. Rather than killing it, Snow thanked it for the warning.

"Look at the way Parleys Creek [flows]; it's serpentine, a clear pattern of a snake," Johanson says. "The things I'm referencing are to be discovered."

Her design also includes a huge sego lily, the state flower whose bulbs fed the pioneers when their crops were devoured by a plague of crickets. The lily, which would serve as a basin on the park side of 1300 East, has veins in one petal, signifying the seven rivers that flow into the valley from the Wasatch Range.

The lily's stem would lead to a tunnel beneath the road that would also serve as a channel to move floodwater west from the basin to Parleys Creek. It's not "art," Johanson says, but an engineered infrastructure.

Once finished, the draw would be the "path of people, wildlife, water," Johanson says. "A sense of life, that you have that life-giving framework moving into the Hollow."

But without the funding, the vision of Johanson and many Utahns would be much restricted. The mosaic tiles that would create the sego lily could be replaced with colored concrete, and an 18-foot-high wall on the west side of the road could be cut in half. That would doom the plan to put re-creations of The Witches, hoodoos and spires on the western side as well.

Which is a big reason why Johanson doesn't want the project to bear the word "art."

"Art equates with dispensable, the icing on the cake that we don't really need," she says. "I'm trying to reframe people's vision of the project. It's a multidimensional project and an enduring one."

As it happens, Johanson lives in a farmhouse, built in the early 1800s, that's about 10 miles from the house where another Mormon pioneer, Parley Pratt, grew up.

"What the project is really about is the courage of the pioneers as they came in, moving through Echo Canyon," she says. "I've tried to create with this park a unique landmark to define Salt Lake City's past, present and future."

The United States is replete with engineering feats that have come to be considered esthetic treasures: the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, the Blue Ridge Parkway. On a smaller scale, but with its underlying utility, the Draw could become one of them.

Peg McEntee is a news columnist. Reach her at pegmcentee@sltrib.com and facebook.com/pegmcentee. —

Donate to Pratt Coalition for the Draw

O The Pratt Coalition is seeking tax-deductible donations to raise $450,000 to ensure the Draw's structural elements west of 1300 East will be built.

PayPal • parleystrail.org

Mail • PRATT Coalition, P.O. Box 520308, Salt Lake City, UT 84152-0308.

In-kind donations • Stock transfers through Wells Fargo advisers also are accepted.