Council delays skybridge vote

As the Salt Lake City Council continues to consider whether to allow a City Creek Center skybridge, the developers say some possible tenants would have liked a decision a month ago.

But the council on Tuesday decided to put off any vote on the issue until at least April 17.

Officials with Taubman Centers Inc., which is overseeing the retail component of the center owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said Tuesday some stores are waiting to decide whether to locate there until they know if it will include a pedestrian bridge spanning Main Street.

"We must stress that time is of the essence in making your decision on this matter," Bruce Heckman, Taubman's vice president for development, told the council Tuesday night. "The department stores have closed their doors. The bulldozers are running."

The skybridge would provide ease of travel for shoppers traversing the two levels of storefronts, planners say.

Without it, "We can't move forward with this design," Heckman said. "That then causes us to pause and see if there are other designs. None are apparent."

Critics of the skybridge say it would discourage movement from City Creek into the rest of downtown, keeping shoppers "trapped like a gerbil cage," as Mayor Rocky Anderson put it. They worry it will block the Main Street view corridor, which looks north toward Ensign Peak, and would set a precedent.

Anderson suggested an alternative might be to close that block of Main Street to traffic.

A statement from the Utah chapter of the American Institute of Architects, read at a public hearing Tuesday, calls the bridge "an unfortunate outcome of the design of the shopping component."

University of Utah urban planning student Daniel Ball said, "This is an investment for everyone, not just them. This is our capital city and this is our downtown." With the millions of people expected to visit the center, he said, "Why keep them enclosed in a skybridge? Everyone loses with this design."

To the contrary, Heckman said, the center would be "a major people pump for downtown Salt Lake."

He expects 10 to 12 million people will visit the center yearly, compared with the five million who visit Temple Square.

A self-enclosed, exclusive shopping center is the last thing developers want, Taubman planning and design vice president Ron Loch said.

"That's not a wise business decision from our point of view," he said. "We want people to come and go, stop 15 minutes to buy a gift on the way home from work or stay and shop for two hours."

He said elevators, escalators and staircases throughout the project, including where it opens onto Main Street, would give shoppers plenty of opportunity to leave the second level and venture onto nearby blocks.