A downtown landmark is coming down in preparation for its re-emergence as part of City Creek Center.

The cast-iron ZCMI facade, a staple of downtown Salt Lake City since the 1870s, is being readied for a careful disassembly, said Dale Bills, spokesman for City Creek Reserve Inc., a real-estate division of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Scaffolding has been installed in front of the three-story facade on the east side of Main Street. Crews have begun removing the facade, a tedious task that Bills said will take "several months."

The facade will be stored and then reinstalled in a new retail space in front of Macy's as part of City Creek Center, about 25 feet north of its existing location, he said. The 20-acre retail/residential/office complex is set to open in 2011.

Martha Sonntag Bradley, a Utah historian and a professor in the University of Utah's College of Architecture and Planning, said it is important to the history of downtown to keep the ZCMI facade on Main Street and in the context of the original building.

"It's been a landmark on Main Street since the 1870s," said Bradley, who in 1991 wrote a history of ZCMI. "It's really a character-defining element of downtown Salt Lake City."

The facade was part of the original Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution, which was founded in March 1868 as "America's first department store," where LDS settlers gathered to sell their goods, Bradley said.

"Brigham Young brought together a number of the more successful businessmen who had businesses along Main Street and asked them to pool their resources," she said.

The original facade was constructed in three phases in 1876, 1880 and 1901, according to Salt Lake City planning documents. The structure being moved is both a remnant of that facade and a re-creation from the 1970s, when the ZCMI Center was built.

The May Co. purchased the store in 1999 and converted it into a Meier & Frank. In 2006, Federated Department Stores bought May Co., and Utah's Meier & Frank stores — including the downtown location — became Macy's.

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