Since 1928, Salt Lake City’s Ballpark Neighborhood has been home to minor league baseball, a cherished local tradition. In 2023, the Salt Lake Bees announced their relocation from Smith’s Ballpark to a new suburban stadium, leaving the historic venue vacant and opening the door for redevelopment.
Today, Smith’s Ballpark functions as a single-use stadium, active only a limited number of days each year, yet it remains a powerful symbol of neighborhood identity and collective gathering. The new Community Design Plan reimagines the site as a community destination that supports local businesses, provides a flexible event venue for the city, improves neighborhood life, and expands opportunities for homeownership. Shaped by a multi-year, community-led process, the plan was guided by resident-crafted principles and the CDC’s Social Determinants of Health. Three distinct design test fits were developed to illustrate different scenarios for the future of Smith’s Ballpark. Through extensive engagement, the community ultimately selected the Adaptive Reuse scenario for its thoughtful blend of historic preservation and new development. The final plan adaptively reuses the existing stadium, supports year-round activity, and daylights three of Salt Lake City’s seven historic creeks.
A surprise, that’s both very creative and very sensitive in the way it involves and engages with the community, including meeting community needs.
The jury admires the way it deals in a very innovative way with an existing stadium, which are becoming underutilized and mostly demolished. Preserving a portion of the stadium keeps an important piece of neighborhood identity intact while giving it new purpose as an anchor for further development. The decision to daylight historic creeks alongside the redevelopment speaks to a holistic approach that repairs ecological and neighborhood fabric simultaneously. The community-led process shows—this feels like a neighborhood people actually want to live in.
