Defining downtown: Various groups draw different boundaries
He attends the Paul Mitchell cosmetology school in Holladay, but he wanted to be near clubs, restaurants, shopping and people. "I didn't want to live all the way out there," says Gillespie. "There was nothing to do."
He turned his attention toward Salt Lake City and found an apartment at The Gateway, which he describes as the perfect downtown locale: a mix of retail, office space and housing.
Gillespie is hardly alone in his belief that The Gateway blocks, once considered "west side," are part of downtown Salt Lake City.
"Historically, it's been the other side of the tracks," says Brenda Scheer, dean of the University of Utah's College of Architecture and Planning. Even so, because of the area's proximity to the blocks traditionally considered downtown, "it never really was a big stretch for people to say, 'Well, Gateway is downtown."'
The way Utah residents define Salt Lake City's downtown is evolving beyond the blocks around Main Street and Temple Square. These days, downtown — depending on who defines it — can span as far east as the University of Utah, as far west the Jordan River, north to Temple Square and south to 1300 South.
Try getting a business or political leader to wax philosophical, and they'll say downtown has no geographical boundaries. It's a mind-set, they'll say, that involves certain landmarks, rather than distance from the city's traditional center.
"If you look at the library, for example, it's farther away from Main Street and South Temple than The Gateway," says Scheer, a specialist in downtown and urban design, and the library is considered an integral part of downtown.
Scheer describes a pattern over the years of the location of downtown shifting. "I always tell people not to worry about the boundaries, but where it is centered and what will take form," she says.
Downtown of the past
In the 1960s, downtown Salt Lake City featured angled parking on Main Street. The heart was 300 South, also known as Broadway, between State Street and West Temple. People shopped at stores such as Auerbach's and the Paris, both of which are now long gone.
The 300 South area was developed at the turn of the 1900s, during a large influx of Jews and Irish Catholics to the city.
"It was actually built as an opposition to the Temple," Scheer says. "It was built by someone who was not LDS. It was kind of an interesting counterpoint to the northern part (of downtown)."
Former Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson reminisces about Salt Lake City's old downtown in its heyday.
"I remember coming down as a boy," he says. "I'm 68 years old. I saw it at the best times. It was almost like being on the streets of Manhattan."
The downtown Wilson faced when he became mayor in 1976 had declined, he says. Interstate 15 had partitioned the city. People had fled to the suburbs. And large indoor shopping malls that cropped up in the suburbs gave people reasons to avoid downtown.
"Now we're more into streetscape and walking around in the ambience of outside, but back in the '70s and early '80s, people used to go to the malls to jog in the morning," Wilson says.
Wilson urged opening Crossroads Plaza and the ZCMI Center to revitalize shopping downtown. "They were immensely popular for 25 years," Wilson says. "And then we had The Gateway built, and most of Main Street shut down."
The Gateway
During the 1990s, city leaders searched for places for Salt Lake City to grow.
The city didn't want commercial development to "creep toward the University of Utah," says Russel Weeks, public policy analyst for the City Council. "The reason for that is there was a viable residential neighborhood between 200 East and 1100 East where people still lived."
City officials devised a plan under then Mayor Deedee Corradini in 1996. The idea was to "consolidate rail lines in the area in what was an old rail yard," says Weeks, who has worked for the city for 14 years. "It allowed the state of Utah to shorten the freeway viaducts and create an economic development that is known as The Gateway."
The Gateway area extends from 900 South to North Temple and from I-15 to 400 West. It's about 650 acres, and within it is the sandstone-colored, 40-acre development by The Boyer Co., which opened Nov. 1, 2001.
Jake Boyer, president and chief executive officer of The Boyer Co., remembers taking heat for robbing Main Street of business: "I think it's just like when the Delta Center was first built, west of what was then considered downtown."
His company believes that The Gateway area has always been downtown, he says. "Downtown is larger than one street. The only downtowns that have only one main street are really small cities."
Bigger downtowns have different districts, Boyer says, and Salt Lake City is evolving from a Main Street-centric downtown to a multidistrict downtown.
But John Speros, owner of Lamb's Grill Cafe on Main Street, believes that The Gateway now is actually the center of the city. "Everyone considers Gateway downtown, because that's where everything moved," he says.
Even parade routes have been moved toward The Gateway.
For Speros, hope lies with the City Creek Center, a $1 billion-plus shopping, housing and office development that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is building on the now torn-down space of the ZCMI Center and Crossroads Mall.
"That will help redefine downtown," Speros says. "Then we'll have a more balanced downtown. It'll be spread over four blocks."
Downtown Rising
But other groups have more sweeping definitions for what will constitute the downtown of the future.
The City Creek Center is the first real project in Downtown Rising, a vision of the Salt Lake Chamber and its nonprofit arm, the Downtown Alliance. The plan calls for six downtown districts: Gateway, Salt Palace, Broadway/Arts and Culture, Temple Square, Skyline and Grand Boulevards/Hotel.
The remaining projects described in Downtown Rising — such as a large Broadway theater — are concepts right now. Some are under study by architects.
The business leaders who signed the charter for Downtown Rising agreed that downtown is not defined by geography but by issues.
"Essentially, this is a market," says Natalie Gochnour, the chamber's vice president of policy. "Markets don't cross the street and end."
Downtown Rising proposes a "green loop" of parks and trails, extending from the Jordan River to Liberty Park, and from Temple Square to 900 South.
The arts and culture district will extend to the University of Utah, to include its museums, Gochnour says.
The Downtown Alliance is funded in part by a city contract to administer services from a special property tax on businesses downtown. The taxes are assessed on an improvement district — roughly between 500 West and 200 East and North Temple and 400 South — established in 1991.
With the money, the Downtown Alliance promotes downtown to the outside world with events, Christmas lights, banners and kiosks.
Bob Farrington, executive director of the Downtown Alliance, says downtown's definition is changing, "and it depends on the context."
RDA and transit areas
The improvement district is different from the Central Business District project managed by the city's Redevelopment Agency. The RDA project is 100 acres roughly between North Temple to 400 South and 400 West to 200 East.
The RDA spends certain property-tax revenues in the area on infrastructure improvements, such as the TRAX extension from the Arena Center to the Intermodal Hub. The RDA also built and owns the Gallivan Center.
In addition, property owners can get low-interest loans through the RDA for new construction.
The RDA began working on improving the Central Business District in 1982. The project is due to expire in 2040.
"This process takes a long time, putting in infrastructure and trying to provide incentives for private development, and in some cases buying land," says D.J. Baxter, the agency's executive director.
Yet one more set of boundaries for downtown comes from UTA, which defines the downtown Free Fare Zone as between the Courthouse Station at 450 S. Main and the Arena Station, at 350 W. South Temple.
The zone was negotiated between the city and UTA in the 1970s, when other cities offered similar free zones, then called "magic-carpet services," says UTA spokeswoman Carrie Bohnsack-Ware.
Even the City Council has dueling definitions of downtown. In 2003, the council adopted "The Future Economic Development of Downtown" policy statement that said Main Street is the heart of downtown. The statement defined downtown as extending from Temple Square on the north, The Gateway on the west, Trolley Square on the east, and the hotel district along 600 South to the south. The City Council has never officially adopted the chamber's Downtown Rising definition of downtown.
In 1995, the City Council adopted a master plan for downtown, which defined the Central Business District: South Temple to 400 South and West Temple to 200 East. The master plan also recognized a "larger area" of downtown from I-15 to 700 East, and from North Temple to 900 South — an area of associated industrial, service, commercial and residential users that support the core.
According to the count of the Downtown Community Council, almost 3,300 people live downtown. And by the ever-expanding definitions of downtown, their numbers likely will grow.
Christian Harrison, the community council's chairman, says he's open to that evolution: "We have no illusions downtown will remain this small."
E-mail: lhancock@desnews.com
Recent comments
I don't personally think so, but I know people who consider the...
Stenar | Jan. 20, 2008 at 5:35 p.m.
It is ironic that the reporter interviews Ted Wilson and Wilson remembers...
laguna | Jan. 20, 2008 at 11:41 a.m.
How I miss my Salt Lake City of the 1960's. Sweet times. Not...
mymy | Jan. 20, 2008 at 12:17 a.m.
