Blessed with mountains and rivers, Ogden is in an enviable place. It has a university, a world-class ski resort 25 minutes away and a downtown filled with historic buildings.

Real estate? It's still remarkably cheap.

"It's the future. [The city] becomes the high-adventure recreation mecca," says Mayor Matthew Godfrey.

But the future he sees may not be the future his constituents want.

And that makes this a pivotal moment for Ogden - Utah's second-largest city from territorial days until it began a quarter-century population slide in the late 1960s. Today, it is seventh-largest.

Where Godfrey envisions a city that uses a gondola and a ski resort on Mount Ogden's west slope as magnets for tourists, outdoor-recreation and high-tech companies, others believe the costs would be too high.

Ogden would be selling its "birthright" - a vast swath of foothills laced with trails - and ignoring its historical character, while pushing out those who have made Ogden home, opponents of Godfrey's vision say.

"We should be making our community a good place to live for the people who live here," says Mary Hall, a former city councilwoman. "We are being very shortsighted if we sell our foothills."

Counters Godfrey: "It will bring jobs and tourism, and increase the tax base."

Curt Geiger, an Ogden native who has moved the North American ski division of Descente to his hometown, puts it this way: "It is now Ogden's turn to bring itself back to life again."

To understand the passion of the debate over Ogden's future, one must look to the past, to a time when the lively city was regarded as a special corner of Utah.

Bob Ballantyne, now 78, remembers Saturday nights, when men would put on suits and ties and head downtown.

"Washington Boulevard would be just jammed when the movies let out. A lot of the excitement was probably the wrong kind, but the whole town was alive," Ballantyne says.

Ogden began as a trading post and became a rowdy crossroads, nicknamed "Junction City," after the transcontinental railroad and a rail line north from Salt Lake City were completed about 135 years ago.

By 1940, hundreds of carloads of livestock, lumber, canned goods, sugar beets and milled flour rolled out of its extensive rail yards every week. Historians point out that as many as 120 passenger trains stopped here every day, disgorging soldiers and Western travelers who walked out of Union Station's front doors and reveled along bawdy 25th Street.

Furniture and clothing shoppers came not just from neighboring communities, but bordering states.

"The Ogden I grew up in had lots of specialty stores, unique stores, owned by people who lived here. They sold high-quality stuff," Dian Woodhouse recalls.

Even as airports and highways began replacing rail in the post-war years, the city was sustained by tens of thousands of jobs at Hill Air Force Base, General Defense Depot (later called Defense Depot Ogden) and the Internal Revenue Service.

By the 1970s, though, people had moved to the suburbs - and took their shopping there as well.

Ogden's population dropped from 70,797 in 1960 to 63,909 by 1990.

While civic activists and city leaders saved architecturally important buildings, built a conference center, a minor-league baseball stadium, an amphitheater, planted 3,000 IRS employees downtown and began a successful redevelopment of historic 25th Street, much of the heart of the city decayed. Central neighborhoods became low-rent havens.

Ballantyne and Woodhouse, who both left in the early 1970s, were appalled when they came home - he in 1990 and she in 1999.

Dollar stores, loan shops and fast-food restaurants had moved in - and out of - downtown; many shops were shuttered. The chain-store-dominated Ogden City Mall, built in the early 1980s to high hopes, was dying.

"It just looked terrible," Ballantyne says.

"It was all tattoo, pawn, tattoo, pawn," Woodhouse echoes. "I thought 'Good heavens, what is going on here?' "

Godfrey says his mandate, since voters first put him into office nearly seven years ago at age 29, has been to fix that perception and the underlying reality.

The young mayor has gained the confidence of many business owners and longtime residents who long for Ogden to regain its economic vitality - if not its glory.

"I can see it [the mayor's vision] really putting Ogden on the map," says Janith Wright, co-owner of Clifton's women's clothing store, which has thrived remarkably in a shell-shocked downtown.

The buzz created by Godfrey's marketing of Ogden, at a time when real estate prices throughout the West are sky-high, is paying off.

Investors have begun buying long-vacant downtown buildings; six snow-sports-related companies have moved at least part of their operations here, bringing more than 200 jobs; and east-bench houses are selling faster than in years, even as the median home sale price remains a reasonable $140,000.

Creating a "mecca," though, depends on a massive project proposed informally this spring by developer Chris Peterson.

The son-in-law of Snowbasin owner Earl Holding, Peterson last year bought 1,440 acres in Malans Basin, about halfway up to Mount Ogden on its west slope overlooking the city.

He would build a mountain gondola from the foothills to a ski-and-300-condominium resort in Malans Basin and possibly to the top of Snowbasin, host of the 2002 Olympic downhill races.

To pay for all that, Peterson wants to buy hundreds of acres along the fairly wide-open east bench, including the city's Mount Ogden Golf Course, plus nearly 160 acres from Weber State University. He would then reconfigure the golf course and sell lots for 400 luxury homes on the fairways and greens.

Mayor Godfrey would use the money from the golf-course sale to build a gondola from the downtown transit center, where commuter rail is scheduled to arrive in 2008, and run it through The Junction mall now under construction downtown. It would pass over neighborhoods east of Washington Boulevard en route to WSU and Peterson's mountain-gondola base.

Those who oppose the project include professionals, WSU professors and civic activists. They say smart economic development would capitalize on Ogden's natural assets - the rivers, the quick drive to Snowbasin, the system of trails leading from scrub-oak foothills to cool, piney canyons of the Wasatch Range. With extensive bike lanes and mass transit that uses buses, streetcars or trolleys, Ogden could promote itself as a "green" city - the kind especially attractive to high-tech companies, they say.

"Ogden has done some things right, and one of those is preserving its foothills," says Hall, the former city councilwoman.

A gondola, she says, would be like an amusement-park ride. And the path systems Peterson promises to expand? "I don't think a trail through a neighborhood is a trail."

WSU physics professor Adam Johnston says he recently moved his young family from a suburb to Ogden because of the open space and trails. "That is a quality of life that really makes me want to live in Ogden."

Other residents see the gondola-ski resort through the prism of an economic divide.

"Is it a city's purpose to make its richest richer?" asks a restaurant-marquee message posted by Ben Belka, a resident of central Ogden and day manager at Pizza Runner.

Advocate Virginia Hernandez-Reza says Latinos, who comprise 29 percent of the city's population, know little about Peterson's project.

"The elite in Ogden, they're the ones benefiting from it," she says.

Johnston, at WSU, wonders why the city does not get serious about mass transit, which has triggered a rebirth in many decaying cities.

"It seems to be more than a metaphor that the gondola goes 'above' that inner city," says Johnston.

Godfrey and backers like Ballantyne see the gondola as an engine that could drive the city's economy.

Peterson figures he will create 1,200 permanent jobs, and that the project - once the 400 homes and 300 condos sell - will pour $500 million into Ogden's economy.

Ballantyne says Ogden will have more money for police and fire service, better sewer and water systems, and more parks.

"Ogden can't even visualize as big as this can be," he says. "If we don't get this through, it will be another 20 or 30 or 40 years before any businesses want to come to Ogden. We're going to be down the tubes as a city."

But Woodhouse disagrees. It's as if Ogden is getting a "forced makeover," she says.

"It should be allowed to grow organically. Imposing something on it that it's not is like putting a dress on the pig and calling it pretty."

kmoulton@sltrib.com