The retail portion of City Creek Center will not be finished until 2012. Renovations at Trolley Square are being finished in phases, with the first phase completed last Christmas and the final phase expected to be completed in January 2010.

Downtown allure

Bowler, who has 16 years of retail experience in Salt Lake City, says retailers want a presence downtown. It's a status symbol, a sign that a business has "made it." A downtown presence also brings big bucks.

"You do have the arts, the convention center and a lot of the tourism that Temple Square brings in that helps create (sales) for retail," Bowler said.

Janice Heilner, owner of Dressed in White, an LDS temple-clothing seller, agrees. Her now-closed Crossroads store benefited from downtown foot traffic. People wandered in after concerts, Christmas lighting ceremonies and broadcasts on Temple Square.

Since July, the 12-year-old company hasn't had a store near an LDS temple, affecting its bottom line.

"Business has really dropped off, because that was our No. 1 store down there," she said. "Without it, it's been a struggle in the stores away from Temple Square."

Dressed in White moved from Crossroads to ZCMI to the basement of the Utah Woolen Mills Clothiers, where "we just didn't have enough (business) to make it worth our while," Heilner said.

She looked elsewhere downtown, but high rents priced her out.

"For example, The Gateway, we couldn't afford to go there," she said. "A place far out from the main (Rio Grande) street is $45 a square foot, and that was several years ago. That was too pricey for us."

Heilner would like to open a store as soon as City Creek is finished. She asked the LDS Church's real-estate arm that owned Crossroads, Zions Securities Corp., if rents would be affordable for small locally owned stores like hers.

"He said it was out of his hands, a real-estate company is doing the leasing, and there is no guarantee" that rents will compare to Crossroads rents, Heilner said. Taubman Centers Inc., based in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., is handling retail leasing for City Creek.

Bruce Heckman, Taubman's project manager for City Creek, said retail lease prices have not yet been set, and Taubman does not plan to make tenant announcements "until six months before opening." Taubman is speaking with former tenants of Crossroads and the ZCMI Center about moving into City Creek, he said, but price reductions for them are unlikely.

Shifting options

Haroon's was forced from Crossroads because of demolition. The Maniars could have kept their Trolley store but said they left because they couldn't negotiate a favorable lease. The cost was too high, and they would have had to temporarily move into another part of the mall as Trolley was renovated.