Review
Title: Misplacing Ogden, Utah: Race, Class, Immigration and the Construction of Urban Reputations Author: Pepper Glass
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Year Published: 2020 (Hardback) 2023 (Paperback)
Pages: 219
Format: Hardback, Paperback
Genre: Sociology, Urban Studies
ISBN: 978160781759B
Price: Hardback, $60.00; Paperback,
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
Growing up in Ogden, Utah, the second largest city in Utah at the time, I always knew Ogden felt different than Salt Lake City or Provo, where many of my relatives lived. I also “knew” that there were bad parts of town that should be avoided. It wasn’t until I got to college at Weber State in Ogden in 1969 that I began to realize some of the realities and equally, the inaccuracies in my perceptions. When one of my professors first described the practice of “red-lining,” a conscious effort on the part of real estate agents and mortgage lenders to confine minorities to a limited geographic area, I immediately could tell you the boundaries of that district in Ogden. It was just something that you learned from friends, schoolmates, and even parents.
When I first became aware of Weber State professor Pepper Glass’s book Misplacing Ogden, Utah, I was immediately intrigued. I loved growing up in Ogden and have been back often visiting family and friends over the years. In this study, Glass, a native of the Midwest who came to Weber State University in 2012, was surprised to hear that Ogden had a bad reputation in the surrounding communities as a place of violence and vice. Friends seemed shocked that he actually lived in the city and expressed concerns for his safety. These comments led him to conduct a somewhat informal survey of several dozen different individuals, representing both majority White and Mormon residents along with minority Blacks, Latino natives of Ogden, and more recent Latino immigrants to the city.
What he found makes for a fascinating study of urban environments that extends far beyond Ogden and applies to most cities. First, he describes “moral boundaries,” or the idea that there are “good” and “bad” parts of cities. These boundaries are purely social constructions, often accentuated by racial and social prejudice, as in the case of the redlining described above. In Ogden’s case, outlying communities in Weber County and the rest of Utah often described Ogden as dangerous, with high crime rates and gang violence, despite Ogden having an overall crime rate half that of Salt Lake City.
Underlying all of this, Glass argues, are the dynamics of Utah’s dominant LDS religion and Ogden’s history as a railroad town, a junction between the Eastern states and the West Coast. Before the coming of the transcontinental railroad, Ogden was much the same as any of the other towns and cities founded by the Mormon pioneers in Utah. But in the decade around the coming of the railroad, more than 70% of Ogden’s original Mormon population had moved out, even as the city’s population doubled. Placing the railroad junction in Ogden rather than in Salt Lake City rankled Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders, who had wanted the railroad to run through Utah’s capital city.
The railroad brought both economic opportunity and notoriety to the city. Ogden’s 25th Street, running from the Union Pacific station to Washington Boulevard, became an attraction for travelers looking for bars, gambling, prostitution, and other illegal activities.
Even within Ogden, Glass found, residents described good and bad areas, bound primarily by streets running north and south and a somewhat less defined boundary north of certain east-west streets. This happened despite the fact that homes on either side of these “moral boundaries” were similar in size and construction. Even more interesting is the attitude of Latino residents, the dominant minority in Ogden. The minority residents who grew up in the city and lived primarily in the less desirable areas recognized the boundaries, but still thought Ogden a great city to live in. The Latino immigrants who came to the city from Mexico and Central America lived in the least desirable areas recognized the boundaries but still found Ogden a desirable place to live, relatively safe, and providing good employment and economic opportunities.
One of the best features of Misplacing Ogden is the use of quotes from the recorded interviews of the study participants. For example, a 24-year-old white male resident said this about Ogden:
“I don’t really view Ogden as a bad place. It’s like a village. It’s just put together differently. The houses are different…It’s multicultural. It’s not just like another concentrated area of Mormons that seems to be the popular thing around here. I mean, I’m sure there are Mormons here in Ogden but—I don’t know. You just see a lot of strange things.”
Or this response from a 46-year-old Latino male:
Interviewer: “So you talked about the lower-class people living down in central Ogden, the middle-class people living in Shadow Valley (on the southeast foothills of Ogden) — so, where do the high-class people live?”
Respondent: “Park City.”
Glass positions his study of Ogden as a classic example of how a city’s reputation begins, propagates, and is reinforced by both insiders and outsiders, whether that reputation is good or bad. These are, after all, he points out, social constructions that become self-fulfilling. He also talks about the process of rebuilding a city’s reputation and how those efforts can often produce unintended consequences, a process Glass calls “magical solutions” that don’t really solve the targeted problems. For example, gentrification can improve the reputation of previously undesirable neighborhoods, but at the expense of those already living there, often minorities and the economically disadvantaged. Ogden’s municipal leaders over the last fifty years have employed various campaigns to change the city’s reputation, initially by trying to cover up its past history. More recently and on a limited basis, they have tried leaning in on Ogden’s bad reputation, stressing the exotic history, similar to the “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” campaign of Nevada’s largest city. Ogden’s 25th Street, often referred to as “Two-Bit Street,” is now a focus for promoting tourism and economic growth with an eye to revitalizing the city’s downtown area. At the same time, city ordinances have been passed limiting food trucks, mostly owned and operated by the city’s minorities, to short hours and not within certain distances of brick-and-mortar restaurants. They are also required to have access to nearby public restrooms. These and other initiatives have tended to divide rather than unite disparate populations in the city.
There is much in Misplacing Ogden both for students of urban studies and for consideration by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that organizes local congregations by geography, a process that has the potential for both uniting communities and deepening divisions at the same time. Ogden occupies both a physical place in Utah’s history and at the same time, occupies a more diverse and challenging cultural and perceived space. The idea of “misplacing” Ogden metaphorically in secular and religious dialogue makes for fascinating reading in Glass’s Misplacing Ogden, Utah.