At first glance, I couldn’t quite make sense of what I was looking at. The picture that one of my friends had texted me (accompanied by a crying emoji) appeared to be a giant pile of wreckage. But then I realized it was a house. Half a house, really. It had a smiley-face yellow excavator parked i n front of it — which would’ve been cute if its sharp, black claws weren’t ripping a giant hole from the peak of the roof to the first floor. Wooden boards, crumpled duct work and insulation, sheets of plywood and drywall, a rectangle of gray carpet peeled back to reveal a sliver of avocado vinyl tile, a forgotten canvas tote. The detritus lay in a heap like misspent lives. The photo showed a portion of the house standing in defiant suspended animation, like a snow globe just before the flakes settle. Some faux shiplap siding clung for dear life to the scalloped A-frame-style roof. To the left of where the front door once was, a bronze sign read “958 Woodside Ave, TOWN LIFT HOUSE.” Aptly named. My friend told me it’d been a liftie house. It wasn’t a landmark or a miner’s cabin or anything particularly special. But it was the kind of place people actually lived. It was part of how you got to be here. It belonged to a different kind of Park City history, the kind that doesn’t get preservation plaques or blue ribbons. Ski resort corporate-speak calls them “lift operators” and “mountain workers,” but for lifties, ski instructors and patrollers, these weren’t just jobs. They were identities tied to a place and time. And houses like this modest 1960s A-frame were part of that world. I get it — rich people don’t want to live in shacks. Growth and change are inevitable. And new housing, including affordable, is necessary. But modern homes are valued for being designed, polished, perfect and new. Older housing accumulates organically over time, lending a sense of something that feels imperfect, unplanned and truly lived in. You can build new houses, but you can’t manufacture history. That’s how a place like Park City gets its character. Not all at once, but over time, through the people who pass through and the spaces that make room for them. The small, slightly worn, often-overlooked houses that blend into the landscape are part of that story. They hold layers that build upon each other to create something you can feel, even if you can’t quite name it. They tell stories of long winters, roommates, late-night keg-stands, Clown Days, hungover pow mornings — and sometimes even ghosts. Andy Cordray, a successful Realtor who’s lived in Park City since the early 2000s, lived in one of the old miner’s shacks on Daly Avenue. At the time, he sported a pink mohawk and he and his roommate were bartenders at O’Shucks. Almost immediately after moving in, they started to notice weird stuff happening. “Like an alarm clock would go off and when we tried to turn it off, it would just get louder and louder,” Andy said. They were in the house about a month when Andy’s girlfriend started seeing things like a creepy pair of legs walking by some old French doors. Then one night Andy was startled out of a deep sleep by the sensation of someone strangling him. “That was it,” he said. As they were packing up to move to another house down the street, an elderly neighbor asked why they were leaving. Andy told her the story of the night he was choked by a ghost. Without skipping a beat, she said, “Yep. That would be my Uncle Harold. He passed away in that house and he was not a happy guy.” Houses like Andy’s, and the one that just got torn down on Woodside, weren’t just old houses with cheap rent. They were entry points to Park City itself. Places full of people and time and memories. You might not know who was there before you or what happened, but somehow you could feel it. And when these places disappear, it changes something about what it means to belong here. My Australian friend Nikki started coming here in 2003 to work at Park City as a mountain host. She lived with friends in one of the miner’s shacks on the corner of 11th and Park Avenue. “We had a guide from Argentina living in the garage in the winter,” Nikki said. “We shared meals, didn’t have a TV and didn’t bother to lock the doors. In good seasons, we even figured out how to ski home. The place behind us was a party house. People dropped by any time and the whole neighborhood felt connected in a way that’s hard to describe now.” That kind of life isn’t exclusive to Park City. When I was in college, I lived with three roommates in the downstairs of a dilapidated house in Allegany, New York. Upstairs lived an old guy named Paul who must have been hard of hearing because he never once complained about our after-after-hours parties. The floors were slanted and carpeted with what felt like artificial turf. The heater in the living room sounded like a turboprop fighter jet taking off when it could be persuaded to turn on at all. Yeah, it was a dump, but it was our dump. Not every place that matters looks like something worth saving. Maybe the house on Woodside was an eyesore. Maybe it was time. But it was also something else. A place people filled with stories, memories and the occasional ghost. And that has to be worth something, maybe even everything. Kate Sonnick is a freelance writer and creative director who prays they never tear down her 1980s condo building in the low end of Old Town. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Substack @katesonnick. The post Betty Diaries: What a dump! The places that made us appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less