At a little after 6.30 this morning, the Key Bank Tower, a 30-year-old high-rise office building in downtown Salt Lake, was imploded to make way for the new City Creek Center redevelopment project. It was the first such implosion in the downtown area since the old Hotel Newhouse was demolished back in ’83 (which I didn’t care about at the time, but in retrospect seems a deep shame, especially since the place where the hotel stood is now — can you guess? — a parking lot! Moreover, a parking lot that is rarely anywhere near capacity! That was really worth taking out a historically interesting and beautiful building, wasn’t it?)
I haven’t been able to find an embeddable video of the Key Bank’s death to post up here, but if you go to KSL-TV’s site, there are several nifty clips for your viewing pleasure. I especially like Angle #1, which has a couple of men in the foreground to provide some scale and drama, and Angle #4, which is a long-distance shot that includes the First Security Building I wrote about a while back. (Look for the red glow; that would be the big neon sign I like so well.) With the Key Bank’s destruction, the so-called Crossroads Block — named for the mall that used to wrap around the base of the tower — is now clear. Meanwhile, across the street, the demolition of the ZCMI Center Mall continues. (Yes, you out-of-towners, Salt Lake used to have two malls right across the street from each other; it actually wasn’t as insane as it sounds, as they had a different mix of retailers and catered to different demographics. As with so many other things about Salt Lake culture, it’s a little complicated and it reflects the social schism between Mormons and non-Mormons…)
I don’t mourn the loss of the Key Bank Tower — it was just a big white box, with no distinguishing features and no particular history to commend it — but I am somewhat saddened by the razing of the mall. It was an ugly building, too, at least from the outside, basically just a block-long stretch of blank wall aside from some small window displays for Nordstroms and the grafted-on facade of a historical building I’m not familiar with.
(Side note: One of the weirder phenomena in these parts consists of putting a historic facade on the front of the modern building that replaced the old structure. For example, the fronts of the Promised Valley Playhouse and the Brooks Arcade are now attached to a parking garage and a mixed-use office-condo building, respectively. The whole concept strikes me as bizarre, like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, wearing the skins of his dead victims. Can any out-of-town readers tell me if other cities do this sort, or is it just a Salt Lake thing?)
I always liked the interior of Crossroads, though. The layout consisted of several different wings that all converged on a central atrium that stood five or six stories high. The ceilings in the wings always seemed low to me, although that may have just been a trick of perspective, and I recall that it was very dramatic to emerge from one of these dimly lit wings into the bright sunshine falling through the skylight that capped the atrium. I used to like to stand at the top of the atrium and look down past the criss-crossing escalators to the fountains in the basement food court far below.
As a teenager who lived in the then-rural south end of the Salt Lake Valley, Crossroads was a cosmopolitan destination, an exciting place filled with people and cool shops that we didn’t have out my way. I rode the bus up there to see movies at the Crossroads Cinema before I got my driver’s license, back when I was just starting to stretch my wings and explore the world beyond the five or six miles I’d always known. And I did a lot of Christmas shopping in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when I was a college student attending the U of U just up the hill from downtown.
In recent years, however, Crossroads had gotten pretty run down, its business stolen away by newer suburban malls and “lifestyle centers” out on the south end. And if the competition wasn’t bad enough, the panhandlers and vagrants who congregated on the sidewalks outside scared away a lot of respectable citizens. The last time I set foot in Crossroads a couple of years ago, it was downright depressing, a warren of vacant storefronts and deserted corridors.
I think City Creek is going to an improvement, at least, I hope it will. It was time for Crossroads to come down, and I doubt I’ll miss it the way I would one of the more distinctive (and older) downtown buildings. But I do have a lot of happy memories of the place, and as always, I do think it’s too bad that things have to change…
