The Gateway, Group 2

Who in Salt Lake hasn't heard of the Gateway? It seems so popular that it doesn't need a description. However, this blog would not be a City as Text blog without a description of some kind, so here is laid out the basic description for the Gateway. It, in essence, is a shopping district. The finest of name-brand stores come here to sell clothing and phones, fine restaurants give the district a wonderful aroma, and many other miscellaneous departments (such as the Planetarium) make this district their home. These stores tend to be on the higher end of the pay scale, so most of the people walking around tended to hail from the upper classes (as can be evidenced by their clothing and general mannerisms).

However, the Gateway is more than a place where accumulated wealth can spend itself on an extravagant pair of shoes. People from many other social epsilons come here for one reason or another. To international travelers, the Gateway may literally be a gateway to the city of Salt Lake. Our group talked to many people while we were there, and we discovered that people from all over the world-Brazil, Australia, Canada, Norway-came here when they visited the city. And, according to all reports, they enjoyed themselves there.

To fans who enjoy displaying their enthusiasm, the Gateway represents an opportunity to get on the news. When we visited the Planetarium, we ran into a group of people dressed in yeti, jawas, and storm trooper costumes who were getting ready to interview for channel 9 news. Needless to say, we leaped at the opportunity to get a photo.

And finally, to the poor the Gateway represents a vast pool of spare change and sympathy. In some terribly ironic twist of events, a homeless shelter lies right next door to the Gateway, so every day the homeless go to the Gateway to beg for spare change. Its a good place to go considering that most of the people that go there a fairly well-to-do, but still, it must be painful for those people to ask for enough money to buy a can of soup when extravagant dinners are being served next to the expensive clothes they may never wear.

On the way back home on Trax, our group had a little bit of a debate as to whether the Gateway is a node or a district. It was like a node, some people claimed, because the Gateway as a whole is a landmark, a place where people gather to hang out and shop. The others claimed that the Gateway is a district because its a place where a lot of similar buildings (in this case shops) are gathered and the place was too big to be a node. In the end, we reconciled our two differing viewpoints and decided the Gateway was both. The concepts of nodes and districts are blurred and generalized, and the Gateway seems to lie directly in between them.