Skyline expanding: Work begins on a new high-rise for Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City's skyline will be getting a distinct new neighbor in August 2009.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held Tuesday for the 222 S. Main office tower, a $125 million, 22-story skyscraper in the heart of Salt Lake City's business district — just one of the projects that will have most of downtown in an under-construction state over the next several years.

"This is just one element of all the things that are going on in Salt Lake City that are so positive, so strong, so right and so good," said Bruce Bingham of commercial real-estate investment and development firm Hamilton Partners Inc.

The office building with street-level retail will be the first high-rise building constructed in Salt Lake City since 1998. At 22 stories, it will dwarf neighboring Hotel Monaco and be two levels shorter than One Utah Center directly across Main Street.

A pair of legal firms already have signed on to move into 222 S. Main St. when completed. Hamilton Partners announced Tuesday that Holland and Hart will occupy the top three floors, bringing 65 lawyers to the new building. The law firm of Brinks Hofer Gilson and Lione also will move into the tower.

The 425,000-square-foot building will include 350,000 square feet of office space and another 9,000 square feet of retail space.

"We see it as a very unique opportunity to create an architectural statement, complementing the business community's Downtown Rising vision with the building being constructed right in the heart of the downtown Main Street corridor," Bingham said.

So, while coats in bright colors and rich-hued denim may be the hot items for fall, in Salt Lake City this season it's all about orange. On cones, backhoes and the vests of construction workers, shoppers can expect to see plenty of the color for quite some time.

As work on the billion-dollar City Creek Center continues, downtown visitors can expect plenty more spectacular deconstruction in the area that formerly housed the Crossroads and ZCMI Center malls, said Mark Tuttle, spokesman for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose real-estate arm, Property Reserve Inc., is developing the project.

Deconstruction is scheduled to continue through next spring, though crews will soon begin working on a four-level, 5,100-stall underground parking garage in the hole left by the demolition of Crossroads Plaza.

"In the next few months, people may be able to see something actually being built," Tuttle said.

Not far from the City Creek site, construction crews have set up shop outside The Gateway, where light-rail construction continues on two sides of the shopping center.