Most of St. George is closed by 6 pm and never opens on Sunday, and as you can imagine this precludes a night life. There's certainly a cupcake shop opened curiously late that could pull some decent business if there was a reason to go downtown at all. The only bar in town (literally, The One and Only) serves 3.2% beer and is max-skeez. A strip-mall coffee shop has live music Saturday nights and once a month the city hosts a musician in the park, but provides a stage with seeming disregard for acoustic requirements.
History surfaces in two interesting ways in St. George. First, the streets have never been narrowed from the width required for wagon travel. A standard residential street is adequate for 5 lanes of modern traffic. This makes crossing the road quite intimidating: A car could be 1/4 mile away and I'm wondering if I'm gonna make it.
More interesting, however, are the acequias. On the edges of super-wide streets, are deep drainage paths. For flash floods? I mused when I first saw them. Yet even when it hasn't rained for weeks, water is still running through these cement chutes. In front of many of the houses are simple steel gates....and it didn't click until I saw someone watering their lawn by diverging the water onto their property, flooding their lawn, and then closing it off again. (The entire system is gravity fed and as you can see in the picture, most property sits just below street level to take advantage of this.) Fascinating! A real acequia in use! However, the amount of water we're talking is disgraceful - it's the g*!damn desert - and I have not yet learned what regulations are in effect today...though I am not optimistic there are many.
It is a silly place.
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