City Creek Center Plans Neglect History March 25th, 2008
The forgotten history of downtown Salt Lake City's Main Street
Mall success and city vitality are a contradiction in terms. One only needs look back 35 years ago to understand this truism. When the Crossroads Mall was built across the street from the ZCMI center, the downtown malls were an instant success. The malls quickly offered a tax revenue windfall for the city coffers, which Salt Lake had been loosing to the suburban shopping centers for years.
However, there is another side to the story that has been completely neglected by the local Utah media. After the completion of the malls, nearly all local merchants on Main Street closed their doors on Main Street forever.
Local merchants couldn't compete with the one-stop-shopping and parking the malls offered. National chain stores like Nordstrom and Weinstocks had huge advertising budgets to squelch competitors and the buying public was thus monoplized on Main Street.
The inconvienient perdiciment the local merchants found themselves in was that the new downtown retail landscape could no longer support both the 600,000+ square feet of retail in the malls, as well as the existing South-end retailers of Broadway and Exchange Place. The old-timers of Salt Lake still remember the splendor and beauty of the former Auerbach's (pictured left) and Paris Company department stores. Both had existed on Main Street for over 100-years and were anchors of the former districts. However, the retail economic concentration and lack of permiability, swayed the buying public to patronize the malls and remain there. Another incentive to stay put: Malls only needed validate parking for shopping done at mall stores. So even though malls offered downtown Salt Lake City hundrends of additional parking spots, these parking facilities, subsidized by taxpayers, only helped hasten the demise of local Utah. The final result of the malls was the demise of the local economic retail vitality of Main Street Salt Lake City. For this reason there is a derth of local historic shops in downtown Salt Lake City. It is thanks to the few surviving shops, we have to thank for steering Utah Stories in the direction of further research in this area.
The long-time merchants who still remain, were all highlighted in our eight-part series how Main Street Was traded for Wall-Street.
Despite the lesson history offers, there has been no public acknowledgement of past mistakes for building the malls on Main Street. If there were proper hindsight, Church leaders wouldn't be partnering with mall developer. Instead, they would be talking to urban planners. A common phrase CCRI and Taubman use, which clearly demonstrates their short-sited view of history, is "to achieve success we must achieve a critical mass of retail". Taubman's Ron Loch, Bishop Burton and others keep repeating this phrase to justify the two levels of retail and skybridge over Main Street. In other words, they need concentrate economic power and regain their monopoly on downtown retail.
A flourishing city street can't have one owner and still provide uniquenss. Diversity is the most beautiful result of the American experiment. Main Street Salt Lake City was once one of the most diverse streets in the world, as people from hundreds of nations, cultures and communities established there to worship, prosper and live. Salt Lake City is indeed the envy of many cities by having such an enormous investment made into our downtown. However, if past mistakes aren't accounted for, they will no doubt be repeated. A mall is no substitute for a flourishing diverse street.
