Placemakers: Myles Rademan

In the mid-80s, Park City’s first and newly appointed, City Manager, Arlene Loble, heard about Myles at a Planning Conference. She sought him out and challenged him to bring his skills and completely shape a falling down, semi-abandoned, mining community… with a ski area or three tossed in. Arlene had the good sense to book Myles into the Washington School Inn, the old schoolhouse from the late 1800s.

It had been recently refurbished by a previous California resident, Mac MacQuoid. That stay, in that part of Old Town, Rademan says, made him see Park City with fresh eyes. The town had possibilities. When Bill Liggety, the Park City planning director, left his position, the headline in the cheeky weekly paper, The Park Record, read “Liggety Splits,” and Myles came on board. After two years as planning director, he shifted to a new position—the first Public Affairs Director.

And right from the start, he created a local leadership program based on his years with the Kellog Foundation. No one really understood the role of Public Affairs Director. But Nick Badami, the new owner of the Park City Ski Area and the owner of the Alpine Meadows ski resort in Lake Tahoe, told him to go out and make something happen.

Myles suggested lights and flowerpots leading up to the resort would be a good start and Nick agreed to have the resort split the cost. Make things happen was the directive he remembers — get a hot dog cart if he had to — just make the place vibrant. Main Street, Myles soon told the City Council, looked like a smile with a bunch of teeth missing.

The staff walked the street and they took slides of what they saw. They saw condemned buildings with broken windows and vacant lots with tall weeds and old broken car parts in the dirt. It became glaringly obvious it wasn’t a welcoming backdrop. It was about then, Pocket Parks became a thing on Main Street.

Spending a relatively small amount of money to rehab abandoned/neglected small lots that the city owned was the goal. In many cases, the City agreed to share in the rehab efforts with the landowners. One such major beautification was creating a plaza in the middle of Main Street. Folks had been climbing a dirt hill

from Swede Alley to enter a dirt patch complete with weeds and often debris that eventually opened onto Main Street. The Alamo bar was right across the street, and two other bars, The Oak and The Club, making that entry point to Main Street highly trafficked. Today, that same space is the attractive Clock Plaza, set between Cafe Terigo and the giant clock next to Utah’s top jeweler, O.C. Tanner.

The City purchased the three lots, which had been owned by a man in Salt Lake City. But the City didn’t want to develop property in those three contiguous lots- they just wanted something vibrant there, and they needed the middle lot to serve as the thoroughfare from Swede Alley to Main Street.

Jeff Mann, a part-time resident from Tennessee, purchased two of the three lots but wasn’t fully sold on the idea of the middle lot as the right-of-way to The City. So The City had a giant public clock made and put his name on the face of it for the next time he came to town. He laughed and conceded to letting the middle lot stay open if they would take his name OFF the clock. That clock stands there still… And mostly tells the right time.

Rademan remembers those days as picking battles- “I didn’t want to fight for, or against, everything.” For example, he says, “We said no to a Smiths SuperCenter in town but yes to preserving The Osguthorpe Farm.”

The politics of place was a critical lesson for Rademan when he arrived in Utah. He needed to understand just where he had landed. He saw the town’s potential but also saw the hurdles in how to get there. And he knew he had to shift a kind of sense of disbelief from the locals -to one of believing in their own potential.

So while the outpost in Utah seemed a bit backwater and off the map, Myles learned quickly there were smart, monied, sophisticated folks who wanted to help shape a town. And then there was the glamour and glimmer of more to come, with the folks down at the Sundance Institute. The actor Robert Redford had started the film Institute at his Sundance Resort, about 45 minutes away from Park City.

In the late 80’s Myles joined the local team that began chasing the 2002 Winter Olympics Games with Salt Lake City. The Games were on a pretty steady path, but nobody saw September 11, 2001 in the cards. Immediately, the focus shifted from transportation issues to ones of security. But all their advance work paid off, with one of the most successful Games recorded.

Something as simple as hanging flower baskets, came about as a result of one of the trips, known as “Summer Tour.” Myles established the Leadership program in a more formal way for The City. He changed the transportation on those tours from private cars to vans and buses.

He learned much of the magic happened in the down times. Folks got to know their fellow Parkites, not in a meeting or on a tour of a building or exploring a resort, but riding along and processing what they had seen and heard. And, of course, trying to synthesize that information in a way that could apply to their own sense of place.

Today, Myles has stepped into his next role; elder observer, on-call ambassador, and second homeowner in the town of San Miguel, Mexico. Myles, his wife, Joy and their adult son, Bryce, owner of the Spitz restaurant franchises, enjoy their time in the sun there when the snow flies in Park City.

And in the warmer months? Myles tosses on his helmet and rides his e-bike on the trails here - on and around the land he helped protect. There is a lot of open space and memories that accompany him on those rides…