This story appears in the April 2026 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
Welcome to the new downtown. In a world where Amazon delivers same-day packages to our doors, and Costco and Sam’s Club stock the universe in stacks of pallets, the most vibrant downtown hubs in Utah have reinvented themselves. Small-business owners aren’t just stocking shelves with merchandise — they are collaborating to design experiences and create community gathering spaces.
In this five-part series, we’ll explore how Ogden, Provo, Salt Lake City, Logan and St. George create wander and wonder in downtown neighborhood hubs. Let’s visit Ogden.
Historic 25th Street, Ogden
It’s a sunny Saturday morning in Ogden, and the hum of community has the winter farmers market at Union Station buzzing. The line at the Yoder’s Donut truck outside is already 15 people deep, and inside, as a four-piece band on an old wooden stage sings twangy love songs, visitors are trying samples at Ogden Granola Company and Volker’s Bakery.
Follow the flow of foot traffic down Historic 25th Street, and you can lose yourself in Gallery 25, where 14 artists curate three floors of work from local artists. Join the morning crowd gathered at Grounds for Coffee, where a sign near the counter says, “Do more things that make you forget to check your phone.” Up the hill at The Monarch, a vast creative space filled with artists’ studios, Russ Flint, who moved to Ogden from Los Angeles, is happy to show you his latest painting taking shape on the canvas.
“The community is the best part of this place,” Flint tells a visitor. “We’ve all become friends.”
On the corner of 25th Street and Jefferson Avenue in Ogden, just across the street from the public library, lunch costs $3.95.
Try a salad with crisp lettuce harvested from a hydroponic indoor lettuce farm a city block away, and pay $3.95. Try a tofu or chicken curry bowl over rice, and pay $3.95. Try spring rolls bursting with a rainbow of fresh vegetables, and pay $3.95.
On this particular Saturday, the Ogden Produce Company is selling lettuce by the bagful at the Ogden Winter Farmers Market, and up the hill from Historic 25th Street, that’s owner Steve Ballard behind the counter serving up lunch at the restaurant. He’s telling anyone who will listen about his mission to make healthy food available in the neighborhood, and the $3.95 experimental pricing is part of that mission.
“I’d say events like the farmers market have been our best tools to change perceptions about Ogden,” says Ballard, who also owns The Sonora Grill. “I grew up here, and people used to refer to Ogden as a dangerous place; it had a rough and tumble reputation. It was pretty valid for a while, but it hasn’t been that way for a decade now. Getting people downtown and having good experiences, getting in the habit of parking, walking around, seeing all the businesses, has been huge for downtown.”
Ballard says when he started his restaurant in March 2008, during the heart of the financial crisis, Pete and Kym Buttschardt, owners of Roosters Brewing Co. on 25th Street, welcomed him, supported him and answered all his questions. Today, other small-business owners in the neighborhood credit Ballard for acting as a collaborator and mentor.
“I once heard someone say that Ogden got poor at the right time,” Ballard says. “There was an entire decade when it seemed like there wasn’t one new business license opened, so it was decay, decay, decay. Everybody was leaving Ogden, and all of the suburbs were tearing up their downtowns and putting in strip malls. But Ogden was skipped over because why would you do that in Ogden? So we say Ogden got poor at the right time, and it saved its historic core.”
Ogden’s tagline is “Ogden: Still Untamed,” but by the time Reide Thompson moved to the city in 2015, Historic 25th Street was already becoming a very different place.
“I moved to Ogden because it was an affordable place to buy a home,” Thompson says. “That same week I moved here, I came downtown and there was a marathon going on. The next week I came downtown, there was the farmers market. And then the week after that, there was an arts festival, and I was thinking, ’How did I land here?’”
Thompson loved the farmers market so much that she ended up running it, and that led to her current position as executive director of Ogden Downtown Alliance, whose mission is “to foster an economically and culturally vibrant downtown.”
In addition to organizing the farmers market, the nonprofit organizes a June car show, a July arts festival, an uber-popular Harvest Moon celebration in September that brings 35,000 visitors downtown, Trick-or-Treat Streets in October and Window Wonderland most of December. In 2025, the Alliance held 32 free community events with an estimated attendance of 309,000. That doesn’t include the 300 dogs who attended “Dogden: Still Untrained,” a September festival that includes a dog parade and pet-focused vendors.
“Last year, we hosted Utah Main Street,” Thompson says, “and one of the projects they had us do was to go out on 25th Street and talk to business owners and ask why they were here, what brought them and what they love about their community. It was heartwarming to hear how many business owners told the team they opened their doors here because of the farmers market, and because of the downtown events that happen in Ogden, and the vibrancy and the people and the community it brings together.”