In hunting around YouTube for videos of this morning’s implosion, I found a few clips that may be of interest to sentimental slobs such as myself who want to reminisce about the downtown malls. The first is an appropriately titled “last look” that’s heavy on schmaltz (warning: Barbera Streisand’s “Memories” ahead!) and includes a little too much footage of the parking garages for my tastes, but also nicely encapsulates what’s going away in the name of progress:

I haven’t mentioned The Inn at Temple Square, which also appears in the above clip. That was one of those buildings we should’ve fought harder for, an elegant little 1930s-vintage hotel that stood at the corner of West Temple and South Temple, right across from Temple Square, and was very popular with newlyweds. It was the first part of the Crossroads Block to come down when this whole redevelopment project began. I never set foot in the place, to my regret…

Moving on, here’s a tourist video that was taken nine years ago, showing the malls in their heyday (well, maybe not their heyday, which was probably in the ’80s, but at least when they were still bustling and viable). This one includes lots of footage of that Crossroads atrium I was talking about in the previous entry, as well as a glimpse of the days when Main Street ran all the way north past the Temple instead of terminating in the LDS Church’s controversial “little bit of Paris” plaza:

And finally, somebody’s video of the Crossroads atrium area coming down: