Personal Blog 2

Lauren Beckett, Group 3

For walkabout number four my group went to Rose Parks. This neighborhood is supposed to be like the ghetto of Salt Lake, so going into it I was prepared to see a lot of graffiti and houses that were not well taken care of, however, I was very surprised to find that when we arrived there we hardly saw any graffiti and the houses and everything were fairly well kept. One thing that I noticed was that mostly Hispanic families or elderly people lived there. Almost all of the stores and restaurants we pasted had signs in Spanish. After talking to Mr. Bradley in class, we learned that after WWII many of the veterans lived in Rose Parks because it was built for the GI bill, so that explains why we saw so many elderly people.

As for the use of the space, I would say that Rose Parks is a highly populated area, and there were quite a few nice trails, like the Jordan River parkway, and also some very nice public buildings like the library/nature museum. Most of the neighborhoods were went through encouraged human interaction the same way any regular neighborhood would, although there were a few that looked more intimidating, because of the demeanor of the house or the people outside. While we were there we did not see much human interaction, although we did have some people wave at us as they drove past, but other than that the neighborhood seemed very quiet and peaceful for a Saturday morning.

The whole point of this walkabout was to take note of the edges, landmarks, paths, nodes and districts as defined in our book, The Image of the City. We defined the edges as Redwood Road, 600 north, and 900 West. As landmarks we found the Rose Park Golf Course, the library/nature center, and the many parks we passed. The main pathway that we noted was the Jordan Parkway which ran all the way through the Rose Parks neighborhood. As for nodes, we found many different churches, including many LDS churches, a Baptist Church, and what appeared to be a Buddhist church. For the last section we noted the shopping area as a district. Overall this walkabout was very interesting, and I learned a lot about Rose Parks, and that it isn’t really as scary as everyone makes it out to be.