On a Wednesday morning, Garff Wayside Gardens is a quiet, peaceful park, where you can hear water in the nearby stream and the traffic of 100 East as it passes. For at least the time being, the park will stay as it is.
Trent Cragun, the developer behind Garden Park Apartments, decided early this month to pull his plans for the 120-unit apartment complex that would have taken part of the park’s land. The project may move to other Utah cities, or return to Logan at a later time.
Darren and Shauna Nielsen were in the park Wednesday morning walking their dog.
“When we walk our dog, we’ve talked to several people that have protested this complex. There weren’t too many people around here that wanted it,” Darren Nielsen said.
The Nielsens can understand why.
“I’m happy with the way it went, because we’ve been here for about eight and a half years. We walk our dog over here, and play usually over across the way. It’s a good family area, and I think the traffic and everything else would have been too much for 100 East.”
Randy Penrod and his wife recently moved to downtown Logan from Seattle.
“We liked kind of this unique funk with the neighborhoods,” Penrod said. “When we received the first notification, it just described an apartment complex and gave some particulars and looking into it, it really seemed like it was going to be out of character with what we saw as this neighborhood.”
While Penrod doesn’t live as close to the location of the proposed complex as some of his neighbors, he still wasn’t happy to hear about it.
“You know, sitting here we can’t see it, but the people who live closer, like just across the street, I imagine their hackles would have been up because they’re going to have to look at that forever,” Penrod said. “I would only have to look at it half the time and I was upset with that.”
For now, he and his neighbors are relieved to see the end of at least the immediate prospect of Garden Park Apartments, although they understand it may be revisited in the future.
“These buildings are going to change at some point in time,” Penrod said. “They want to go to high density, so it means they’ll have to change the character a little bit, but what they were going to do there, really, I don’t think, is what they’d want in the end. It’s not what I’d want. I’m happy to see it go because now I don’t have to go to town meetings and stand up there and tell them why I don’t want it.”
