You probably didn’t know Tina Lewis, who passed away recently. While you may not have known Tina, you can’t live here and not know her work. She was one of the founders of modern Park City.
Tina moved here from Salt Lake in the early 1970s. At the time, Park City was a pretty derelict place, with a fair amount of Main Street still vacant and boarded up. The ski resort, opened by United Park City Mines in 1963, was foundering, and had been sold to Edgar Stern in hopes that he could make it work. New condos started going up, but Old Town was mostly ignored.
Tina was famous for the “Tina Touch,” that little extra juice that made every project she worked on that much better. She, along with Amanda Peterson and others, created the Park City Chamber Bureau to market Park City. On the City Council, Tina always pushed for better function, but also a better look for everything. If you see a City truck drive by, it will have a Tina-designed logo on it. A cohesive brand was part of providing cohesive services. All departments of the City suddenly became part of the same team.
The City had an epic battle with UDOT, which at the time had jurisdiction over Main Street, about the street lights. When somebody told Tina that the old, original, light poles sat in the boneyard behind the public works shed, she led the charge to get them installed over UDOT’s objections.
Historic preservation was her passion. Old City Hall, now the museum, was a Tina project. The school district had replaced their buildings, and the Marsac elementary school and the old high school that is now the Library/Santy auditorium were abandoned and deteriorating. Under Tina’s relentless push, despite extremely tight budgets, old City Hall became a museum, Marsac was bought from the school district and remodeled into City offices, and he old high school was bought and stabilized, even though it wasn’t clear what the end use would be.
Miners Hospital, originally where the Shadow Ridge condos are now, was moved to City Park. It sat there, up on blocks, until the City could scrape up the funds to turn it into a library – a vision Tina had to sell to the community. The modest collection in the old library on Main, next to City Hall (now part of the Museum), was moved in a book brigade involving hundreds of residents passing the books down the street, hand to hand, from the old library to their proper place on the shelves in the new library at Miners Hospital. Tina always said that in the thousands of books that made the trip, only one went missing: “The Joy of Sex.” She arranged national TV news coverage of the event, because that’s just how she did things.
Credit: Park City Historical Society & Museum, Park Record Collection
I worked at the City during most of her time on the Council. Deer Valley was just coming on line, and the City was struggling to keep up with the new service demands. It was always a challenge to find the cash to keep up with the expansion of basic services. Sometimes it took some creative accounting to get funds into the right account to meet payroll.
In the heat of those discussions, Tina would propose something like building a couple of thousand feet of very expensive wrought iron fence along the Cemetery. At the same time she participated in the details of the financing for her projects, Tina would have the council table covered with a huge canvas banner that she would hand sew to promote some event. Before Deer Valley Drive was built, Park Avenue was the entrance to town, and Tina always had a banner hung across the road announcing something.
Tina was the driving force behind the preservation of Old Town. She pushed for preservation ordinances, and backed them up with a grant program to help stabilize houses that needed everything from a foundation to a roof. She was the very definition of charm and grace, warm and engaging, but always ready with a dirty joke on the side. Anything that got the Tina Touch was better for it. Take a careful look around Park City and you will see Tina everywhere.