Moving to Salt Lake City

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

It’s been a very eventful month so far.

One month ago today I was abruptly laid off from my the job I’d had for over five years here in northern Baltimore. No warning, just a perp-walk to the door and a month of severance pay.

So I’ve been frantically looking for work. It eventually came down to two locations: Albany, NY and Salt Lake City, UT. Albany offered a heck of a lot more money, but the project and the city didn’t excite me. Salt Lake City offered less, but the city and the project are both more my speed- and we’ve got some good friends who just moved there to work at the same company.

Last night we made the final decision- SLC it is. So… anyone got any good advice?

We managed to sell our current house- which makes us very sad because we really love this place- and we intend to buy a house in SLC. We prefer a more rural area, but my new office is downtown, so I imagine that’ll mean a fairly long commute. Luckily my wife’s company is going to let her work offsite at least through the end of the year, so her commute will be nil at least until December. Any good areas for us to look in?

I’ve been reading a lot about the “inversion” that happens during the winter- please tell me it’s not as bad as it looks.

I understand that there’s a lot of good food, including sushi (this was another big checkmark in our decision- Albany seems to specialize in just Italian food).

We’re not really big fans of the heat, but from what I hear it’s much drier, so it’s not as bad as, say, my hometown of Houston. Still, though, not really looking forward to that.

It looks like we’ll be driving out there in about three weeks, while our house is being packed and moved. We’re looking forward to that trip, even though we won’t have as much time or money for a road trip as we’d like.

Any suggestions or advice?

2

I lived there for four years, but it was a long time ago. I loved it, but the persistent Mormonism gets on some people’s nerves. My thoughts:

1.) Yes, the inversion happens, and the SLC valley between the Wasatch Front and the Oquirrh Mountains is a great big bowl, to which the cloud layer looks like the lid on a Tupperware bowl. You can get stuck not seeing the sun for weeks in the winter. If you go up into the moluntains you can get above the inversion layer and see the sun. I thought of this as Nature’s way of telling me to get and and do more skiing in the winter, although you can satisfy your sun-need by shopping in Park City or such instead.

2.) I understand that the liquor laws have loosened up in SLC from what they were in my day, when you had to join a Private Club (or go home to your state liquor store-bought alcohol) to get anything stronger than 3.2 beer. If that’s not entirely true, you can always go to Wendover Nevada (a 1 hour drive), or up into Park City, where the rules are looser.
3.) Sam Weller books. And The King’s English books for mysteries. I know they’re both still there.

4.) Absolutely do not miss the Christmas lights in Temple Square.

3

I think they’ve changed the laws about drinking, so you should be safe to get your drunk on:

4

I was there for a week and it felt like I was in Stepford. One of the stranger places I’ve ever been.

5

Pepper Mill had a similar reaction. But I loved it, myself. Very friendly and family-friendly people. But you have, as one person put it, the sense that the government isn’t letting you be a grown-up.

6

If you felt that way in SLC, it’s a good thing you didn’t spend any time in Provo.

I’m not sure if Family Home Evening is a major event these days, but there was a time when Monday evening turned predominantly LDS communities into ghost towns. YMMV.

7

When I was out for the interview, they told me that as a non-Mormon, I’d pretty much have the run of the town on Sundays.

8

I don’t think this was true even when I lived in SLC many years ago. SLC has the largest proportion of non-LDS, and I’ll bet it has an even higher proportion now than when I lived there.
You’re not going to have the “run of the town” if there are plenty of other irreligious people there with you. You won’t have the run of the ski runs on Sundays, either, I can guarantee you.

9

It’s a miniscule data point, but we drove across country from Northern California to New England a couple of years ago, and had to stop fairly frequently due to big dogs, young kids and other such reasons. So we stopped in a fair number of towns and interacted with their denizens. The experiences were universally neutral-to-good-to-memorable, with the exception of one city.

In that city, we made four or five stops for gas, a few groceries, directions, dog walking and lunch, and everyone we encountered, from parking lots to counter to management, was surly, snappish and downright nasty. There were no exceptions, not even more towards neutral. The name of the City will be left as an exercise for the reader. So much for the influence of Mormonism, though… I guess they’re only nice out in the rest of the world.

10

SLC has a great community radio station. KRCL 90.9 and you can stream it. City Weekly is a free, weekly newspaper, also available online.

11

I have a reverse, (and even more miniscule:) ) data point: I once flew between 2 cities: from Salt Lake City to New York City. In SLC, everybody was polite, the cab driver was helpful, etc.
In NYC—well…not so much.

12

Try to talk to OneCentStamp, he lives in Utah now, IIRC.

I grew up in Salt Lake, but moved away permanently in 1990, so any information is hopelessly outdated. However, it’s probably a little better than people who were there for just a week or so, but nothing like people who work in your new office.

SLC is getting much less Mormon. I grew up in the area just below the “U” (UofU), and it was a good 80% plus Mormon then. Now, it seems much less.

I like the "avenues" area of Salt Lake.

I liked the Japanese food there, and found it on the more authentic side. One favorite restaurant was Kyoto and it looks like it’s still getting good reviews.

While Salt Lake is hot in the summer, it’s really dry. We used evaporator cooling, which is much cheaper than AC.

Good luck.

13

I accept that our experience was somehow nonrepresentative, but I’ve heard from others that they’ve encountered much the same thing as visitors… a city of grumpy, surly service and sales people.

NYC I get along with fine. They aren’t rude, they’re busy and move fast. Chatting over your change is wasted time. Don’t waste their time, even if you need help with something or directions, and they’re astonishingly polite and helpful. Just fast.

We were just there and (as always, sigh) I went the wrong way out of GCT. I stopped and muttered, half to myself, “Damn. Where’s 46th?” Without even slowing, a fashion model looking at her phone said clearly, “right ahead, turn left.”

14

I used to cover Utah for work and was there at least once a month for five or six years. The relentless niceness of everybody was very off-putting to me. Say a swear word every once in a while, damnit! SLC is a lot different from the “Mormon” towns. It’s fairly cosmopolitan with a nice library and some good museums. Skiing is great, too, and much closer to the city than the resorts in Colorado are to Denver.

There are those inversions, though. Yuck. You can drive up to the mountains, though, and you suddenly pop through this layer of cold, nasty, polluted air, to bright sun and 20° warmer temperatures.

I have to disagree about the food, though. Although there are some good restaurants (Blue Iguana for Mexican), Utah as a rule has really bad food. Really bland and sometimes downright awful. It’s like they plopped Ottumwa, Iowa into the Rockies. Without the pork sandwiches. I think it is due to the general lack of alcohol consumption - it’s hard to run a profitable upscale restaurant if no one is buying wine and cocktails.

15

Not only do I live in Salt Lake City now, but I moved here from Maryland originally, just like the OP. :cool:

Salt Lake City proper is a very different animal to the rest of Utah. It’s a cultural difference almost on a par with Austin vs. the rest of Texas. SLC is no longer predominantly Mormon, and has had Democratic mayors for the last 20 years straight. Salt Lake City definitely wants to be a green, crunchy, bike-friendly city, like a little bit of the Pacific Northwest right here in the mountains.

The liquor laws are a little odd, but you’re unlikely to bump up against many of them very often. The ones I find most annoying are the non-availability of wine and liquor in grocery stores, and the no sales on Sunday.

If you’re a skier or snowboarder, you’re within an easy 30 minute drive of six or seven of the best resorts in the world, and they’re pretty reasonably priced. If you aren’t a skier or snowboarder (I’m not), the canyons that house those resorts make for absolutely gorgeous drives and hiking, and those things are free. Southern Utah has so much amazing canyonland that there are three or four state parks that would be national parks if they were in any other state.

As far as commuting downtown goes, Salt Lake City has a top-notch light rail system that can get you downtown quickly, cheaply, and safely from most of the valley. If you elect to drive, downtown Salt Lake is much better for parking than most bigger cities. (I live in town and work in the southern 'burbs, so I miss the traffic both ways.)

Places to live: if you’re looking for rural rural, but still want to be able to commute reasonably to Salt Lake, you’re looking up in Summit County - towns like Peoa and Kamas. If you can handle the suburbs, Herriman, Draper, South Jordan, and Sandy are blowing up right now with new, affordable housing. You didn’t make it sound much like you wanted to live in town, but if you do, let me know and I’ll throw you some neighborhood names.

Wow, that was a jumble. Hit me directly in this thread if you have any questions I haven’t answered, or PM me if it’s something more private. Congrats on the new job; I hope you love it here.

16

I live over the hill in Park City, it’s a 30 minute commute to SLC , and jolly nice , if you don’t want to live in the city. The inversions do get pretty bad down there, but as someone said up thread, its just nature saying you should be up the hill skiing.

One Cent has more accurate information than me, but the university and Sugar house areas of SLC are really quite nice .

Great place for outdoors life , national parks, national forests, state parks, reservoirs and much hiking mountain biking and skiing, desert camping etc. Temperatures, well salt lake gets hot, in the summer up in the 90s and occasional forays to 100, but it is dry, not nearly as stifling as Houston ( I lived there for 3 years, Houston is ugly hot)

Food is decent, only one good Indian place in SLC ( none jn PC), some good sushi ( you should head up to Oishi in Park City). Quite a few brew pubs are around with some good local beer. You can only get 3.8% on draught, and you have to get full strength beer, wine and spirits in the local state liquor store. Not a big deal until you find out on Sunday you are out. The only option then is to head to the High West distillery that can sell whisky off sales on a Sunday. Utah liquor laws are odd. There are now 3 Vodka distilleries in the SLC area and Squatter, Wasatch, Uinta, and 3 more whose names elude me local breweries.

Generally pretty safe and good place to bring up kids. The only issue we heard of was if you live in a heavily Mormon areas, non LDS kids can have a harder time at school, that’s anecdotal evidence, take it with required salt and caution.

17

I have 2 online friends who live in SLC and when my travels took me that way, I arranged a 2 day stopover to meet and visit. Neither were Mormons and both were fairly proud of their city and went out of their way to show it off to me. I was told that one of the nice things for a single guy about SLC were the female Former Mormons who seem to migrate there. I got the impression that these FFMs (I just invented that now) were of a mindset to, um, make up for lost time. And you can interpret that however you want. .

We drove by the LDS Temple. The main hq. It’s much smaller than I expected. It seems real life doesn’t come fitted with those wide angle lenses they use for postcards of the place. And I was further disappointed to be told by my friend that my chances of being allowed in the tabernacle and permitted to play “Louie Louie” on the choir’s pipe organ were so slim he wasn’t going to bother to even consider finding a place to park near there. I did notice a LOT of men on the sidewalks around the Temple grounds and the high rises that surround it dressed in short sleeved white shirts and neckties.

That being said, there’s an place there called “Piper Down”. It’s in the style of an Olde English Pub. You might enjoy it more if you didn’t bring your wife along, as the attractive and friendly female waitstaff there wear uniforms that accentuate their décolletage and wear rather short pleated tartan skirts. And they have trivia competitions or at least they were having weekly ones when I was there. I ended up in a small team of my friend and some guy there who needed to be on a team and we came in 7th out of 22, so I don’t think we embarrassed ourselves. Oh, and did I mention that the waitstaff there are attractive?

18

I used to work with a guy who traveled to SLC for the company a few times a year for a week at a time. He had a t-shirt that said “Eat Drink and Be Merry for Tomorrow You May Be in SLC.” I don’t think he enjoyed his time there. Hope you do, Lightnin’

19

In a weird coincidence, I lived in Houston for five years directly before moving to Utah in 2010. That makes you, me, and the OP who’ve all lived there. As Precambrianmollusc states, summer is hot in Utah, but dry and relatively short. Nothing like the six months of hell you get in Houston. On the flipside, it gets cold as shit here in the winter. :smiley:

OP, my wife and I are both wannabe gourmands, both in terms of restaurants and home cooking. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to let you know some of our favorite restaurants and grocery stores.

The Three Other Breweries: Epic is in SLC and specializes in extreme beers (12% ABV and matured in ex-bourbon barrels? You bet!). Bohemian is in SLC and specializes in authentic renditions of traditional beers like Czech Pilseners and German Schwarzbiers. Both have excellent restaurants attached. Red Rock is more of a straightforward burgers n’ wings brewpub.

Anecdotally, my wife and stepson are Jewish and I’m atheist, and his non-Mormonness has never been an issue at school. It simply doesn’t come up, but if I had to guess, I’d say most of the kids at his junior high are not Mormon. That would probably not be the case anywhere outside Salt Lake Valley.

20

We moved in late '09 (but from overseas) , we were in Houston in 01-03.
Always interested to hear of any decent restaurants or decent supermarkets, not that with 3 kids at 2-6th grade ages we get out a whole lot.
The Epic beers , ahh yes , probably why I can’t remember them. The Bohemian pilsner is pretty decent.
I haven’t had any of the Shades of Pale beer yet. They were set up in PC and had to move for some reason, and are getting their new brewery up and running.
Fantastic fall weather, had a great hike part way up Timp today.