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 The loft of Grandpa’s barn in Salt Lake City was “off limits,” the trap door padlocked. For boys like Zack Lund, Grandpa might as well have hung out a large “welcome” sign inviting them to break in and see what was hidden there. In Parowan, young Nevada Driggs decided to discover for himself whether Captain Fremont had really slept in his grandma’s bed. Fae Decker Dix tells of how her father refused to accept the church’s newly censored version of a nineteenth-century hymn. To her embarrassment, he sang the original hellfire lyrics to O Ye Mountains High as loudly as he could above the rest of the congregation. All told, this new anthology features sixteen priceless stories: quirky and fun, informative and serious, but all engaging—nostalgic for when Utah was little more than a wide spot in the road, or as Robert Mikkelsen remembers, when both sides of the tracks were the “wrong side.”

Generations of Ogdenites have grown up absorbing 25th Street’s legends of corruption, menace, and depravity. The rest of Utah has tended to judge Ogden—known in its first century as a “gambling hell” and tenderloin, and in recent years as a degraded skid row—by the street’s gaudy reputation. Present-day Ogden embraces the afterglow of 25th Street’s decadence and successfully promotes it to tourists. In the same preservationist spirit as Denver’s Larimer Square, today’s 25th Street is home to art galleries, fine dining, live theater, street festivals, mixed-use condominiums, and the Utah State Railroad Museum.

25th Street Confidential traces Ogden’s transformation from quiet hamlet to chaotic transcontinental railroad junction as waves of non-Mormon fortune seekers swelled the city’s population. The street’s outsized role in Ogden annals illuminates larger themes in Utah and U.S. history. Most significantly, 25th Street was a crucible of Mormon-Gentile conflict, especially after the non-Mormon Liberal Party deprived its rival, the People’s Party, of long-standing control of Ogden’s municipal government in 1889. In the early twentieth-century the street was targeted in statewide Progressive Era reform efforts, and during Prohibition it would come to epitomize the futility of liquor abatement programs.

This first full-length treatment of Ogden’s rowdiest road spotlights larger-than-life figures whose careers were entwined with the street: Mayor Harman Ward Peery, who unabashedly filled the city treasury with fees and fines from vicious establishments; Belle London, the most successful madam in Utah history; and Rosetta Ducinnie Davie, the heiress to London’s legacy who became a celebrity on the street, in the courts, and in the press. Material from previously unexploited archives and more than one hundred historic photos enrich this narrative of a turbulent but unforgettable street.

Winner of the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction.
Chosen by Foreword as a finalist in the regional category for their IndieFab Book of the Year Award.