Lego fills the Sandy expo center, Shoreline Mafia headlines Herriman, and a Salt Lake County house hits a record price

BrickSlopes opens to the public at noon Friday and runs through Sunday afternoon. The theme this year is Ye Olde Slopes, so the floor is given over to castles, and the builders who fill it come in from around the country with creations they have been assembling since last summer. Between the display tables there is a brick pit, derby ramps you can race a car down, and a vendor hall selling the pieces you cannot get at a store. What makes it different from a display case at a mall is that the builders stand next to their own work and will talk to anybody who asks a question. It is the only locally owned Lego convention in the state, and the serious builders get the building to themselves on Thursday before the doors open to the rest of us. Two things decide how your visit goes. The lot is the first one: the Crystal Festival, a free rock, gem and fossil show, takes another hall in the same building Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 8, so on the weekend that parking lot is carrying two crowds instead of one. Friday from noon to 6 is the quiet window, and it is also the shortest, so people skip it. The other thing is TRAX. The Blue Line has a stop called Sandy Expo, named for this building, which takes the lot out of the equation entirely.

The Salt Lake Board of Realtors released its mid-year affordability report this week, and the county's median single-family home price hit a record $645,000 in the second quarter, up about 4 percent in a year. To carry that at current rates a household needs $186,827 a year, which is 7.75 percent more than the $173,392 the same report showed in the first quarter and the highest that number has been in two years. The spread between cities inside the county is the part worth sitting with. Draper is the most expensive market here and asks $259,641 a year against a $925,000 median, while West Valley City is the most affordable and asks $148,470 against $497,500. Same county, same commute, a $111,000 difference in what a household has to earn.

A sprinkler above the Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre on the University of Utah campus went off this month and put water through three levels of the building, the stage and the orchestra pit included. Pioneer Theatre Company is not waiting on the repairs. Its season opener, John Proctor Is the Villain, moves to the Jay W. Lees Courage Theater at the Westminster Performing Arts Center and runs September 11 through 26. That is a considerably smaller room than the one on campus, and the company has said seats are limited because of it. Anybody holding a subscription for the fall is now holding a ticket to a different building.

The Patriotic Chalk Art Festival runs Friday from noon to 7 at Riverton City Park as part of the city's Friday Fun Nights. Free, and you can either draw something or just walk the squares and look.

Joy in Rhythm wraps its season Friday with the Hot House West Swing Orchestra at the Gallivan Center, 6 to 10, free. Dance lessons up front, food trucks and art vendors around the edges.

Salt Lake finished its homestand by splitting the four games that got played against Reno, with Sunday's finale called off. Now comes a six-game road set in Tacoma, and the clock is the story.

Utah lost 4-2 at San Diego on August 21, which ended the run that had them near the top of the league earlier this month. The record underneath it is still the best this club has ever had.

A long-running Korean house on Decker Lake Drive, sharing an address with Itto Sushi, that the west side has been eating at for years without much fanfare. Order the gochu jjamppong. The standard jjamppong is the seafood noodle soup everybody knows; the gochu version stacks chili on top of it and comes out deeper and rougher, with squid, mussels and noodles in a broth that stains the bowl. If you are bringing somebody who does not do heat, the tofu soup with seafood is the other thing regulars order.

Butterfield Trailhead Regional Park sits at the mouth of Butterfield Canyon in Herriman and opens onto more than 13 miles of multi-use trail in the Southwest Canyon Trails Network, connecting through to Yellow Fork. The county runs it with Rio Tinto Kennecott and the Bureau of Land Management. A monsoon storm on July 22 tore out a section of Butterfield Canyon Road about five and a half miles up, narrowing it to a passable strip roughly eight feet wide, and the county has had the road closed to vehicles ever since with no reopening date posted. The trails stayed open the whole time.

Friday at 7:30 in downtown Salt Lake, free and no tickets required.

Friday evening in Murray, put on by the city's cultural arts program.

Saturday from 10 to 6 at the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns, free to walk in and free to park.

Woodbury Corporation has wrapped the conversion of the IBM building at 348 E. South Temple, a project it started planning at the end of 2020. There are 181 apartments now: 20 inside the original 1960s concrete building and 161 in a new seven-story tower behind it, with a courtyard tying the two together. Units run from about 373 square feet to 1,595, five penthouses sit on top, and the smallest ones start near $1,299. The restoration pulled $3.2 million in combined state and federal historic tax credits and kept the barrel-vaulted ceilings, the terrazzo floors and the three stories of concrete arches that face South Temple.

Great Lakes Capital has filed for a demolition permit on the two buildings at 738 W. South Temple, a two-story masonry structure and a metal warehouse totaling about 6,300 square feet that a towing company occupies now. In their place goes The Gregory, six stories and roughly 75 feet tall, with 169 units over one level of underground parking. Every one of them is income restricted, ranging from 30 to 80 percent of area median income, in studios through three-bedrooms. The city redevelopment agency put $2 million into it through its housing loan program. Demolition is penciled for January 2027, which puts the finished building years out.

Salt Lake County has settled the shape of the Salt Palace rebuild, and it is a full closure rather than a phased one. The convention center shuts completely in the fall of 2027 and stays shut about three years, reopening around 2030 with two ballrooms instead of the one it has now. Before any of that, in early 2027, the county closes on a $55.4 million sale of the building's western edge to Smith Entertainment Group, which is what clears the blocks east of the Delta Center for the sports and entertainment district. Some of the conventions that would have filled downtown in those three years are expected to land at the expo center in Sandy instead.