SLC has been trying to fix Pioneer Park for more than a century

The original design for Pioneer Park's playground, 1910. Image from The Salt Lake Herald-Republican via Utah Digital Newspapers, the University of Utah

Much of Pioneer Park is under construction with improvements city leaders hope will shake the park's reputation for crime and blight.

The big picture: It's a long tradition in Salt Lake City, where leaders have been trying to spruce up Pioneer Park since the 1800s.

This is Old News, where we stroll down the tree-lined paths of Utah's history.

Zoom in: 116 years ago this week, the city promised Pioneer Park would get Salt Lake's first playground for kids.

Why it mattered: SLC was one of just two cities of its size without a playground — and the city hoped a family-friendly attraction would turn things around at Pioneer Park.

Catch up quick: The park, whose land served as one of the pioneers' first settlements in 1847, quickly became a black hole of urban planning after the city bought it from Brigham Young's heirs in 1879.

A park plan was chosen in a design contest a few years later, but instead the land was left to lie fallow. A few railroad companies tried to build depots on it, but people still wanted the park that kept not happening.

By the 1890s, it was called "worthless public ground" and "a wilderness of weeds" having been "allowed to go to rack and ruin."

Pioneer Park was dedicated in 1898 — but it remained a "barren and forbidding spot" and was almost given to the train companies until another formal park dedication five years after the first one.

What they said: The park promised to be "a breath of heaven's own bliss," The Salt Lake Tribune extolled.

Instead, it was taken over by an "army of tramps," the paper later reported. Young girls were frequently harassed and attacked, people had sex and got mugged in the dark, and the city closed the park in 1908 because it had become a "resort of hobos."

Finally, around 1910, the city put some money into rebuilding the park, making the playground its centerpiece.

Friction point: Just two weeks after approving the bids, the city gave the playground to Liberty Park instead.

The Salt Lake Tribune, July 30, 1911. Image via Utah Digital Newspapers, the University of Utah

Yes, but: A year later, Pioneer Park got its playground at last, with swings, teeter totters and a pool.

It won national praise and drew tourists from the nearby train station.

Zoom out: For a while, the improved park also turned the neighborhood around.

But by the 1930s, "hoodlums" were once again scaring off residents, and police were rounding up more than 100 transient people at a time.

The bottom line: Zhuzhing up the park can work, but you gotta stick with it.