Where the Water Waited: Daylighting Red Butte Creek at Ballpark NEXT
Authored by: Ronnie Pessetto
At the heart of Salt Lake City’s Ballpark NEXT initiative is a powerful component: partially daylighting Red Butte Creek, transforming it from a buried relic into a living stream that reconnects people, ecology, and history in the Ballpark neighborhood. This isn’t simply about uncovering water—it’s about revealing a thread of identity that runs deep beneath the urban grid.
Daylighting, the urban design practice of unveiling covered waterways, has transformed neighborhoods around the world by reducing heat, managing stormwater, improving air quality, and inviting wildlife back into city life. In Salt Lake City, this concept has already proven transformative at the Three Creeks Confluence, where Red Butte, Emigration, and Parleys Creeks were restored in 2021, creating habitat, gathering spaces, and watershed education for the surrounding community.
Drawing on that precedent, the Ballpark NEXT plan proposes a Partial Adaptive Reuse strategy: rather than erasing the site entirely, design teams envision a future that weaves fragments of Smith’s Ballpark with open water, pocket parks, and active public space. In this scenario, the creek takes center stage—flowing through restored channels, edged by native plantings, public plazas, and trails, and offering visible, sensory access that has long been hidden beneath 1300 South .
Implementation ideas include pulling the stream from the culvert, carving a channel below street level to allow for flood storage, and integrating a pedestrian trail corridor alongside it. This daylighted creek would occupy just a fraction of the 13.5-acre site—perhaps around 20%—leaving plenty of room for affordable housing, shops, and cultural spaces. Signage, interpretative art, and creative placemaking would acknowledge this once-hidden waterway even in areas where it remains underground.
Bringing Red Butte Creek back into the open isn’t just an aesthetic choice—it’s a bold step toward ecological resilience, urban health, and environmental justice. The Ballpark neighborhood currently offers less than the city’s average parks and trails per capita. Daylighting a creek here would significantly increase green space while improving stormwater filtration, reducing urban heat, and supporting wildlife.
This vision aligns strongly with the City’s guiding principles: neighborhood safety, connectivity, natural geography, health, and honoring history—all centered around this newly revealed stream. As the Urban Design Framework proceeds through stakeholder sessions and drafts into late 2024 and early 2025, daylighting remains one of the most compelling and community-supported options.
The true story here isn’t just about tearing down a stadium—it’s about reawakening the city’s soul. Uncovering Red Butte Creek would return a piece of natural and cultural memory to the surface, creating a vibrant, inclusive place where water connects people across generations. It’s an invitation: to walk beside water, to slow down, to remember—and most importantly, to reimagine the Ballpark site as a living, breathing ecosystem once more.
