[Ed. note: this topic is well past its prime — which was way back around the second week of December, if you’re keeping track — but it’s something I still wanted to talk about, so here we are…]
I write fairly often on this blog about the changing face of the Salt Lake Valley, how places and landmarks I’ve known all my life are disappearing, and how difficult it is for me to see them go. I’m not sure why this so-called “progress” affects me so deeply, but it does. Watching yet another familiar old house or historic commercial building fall, or an alfalfa field get paved over to make way for yet another WalMart-Home-Depot-Chili’s-cell-phone-store cluster, fills me with a genuine sense of despair. And it makes me downright angry that the local Utah culture, collectively speaking, pays so much lip service to its heritage by throwing a parade and fireworks every July 24th, but seems so disinterested in preserving any of the tangible aspects of its past, namely the buildings and landscapes of earlier times.
Part of why I feel these losses so keenly, I think, is just my nature. I’m one of those people who doesn’t handle change very well, and I have been ever since I was told that my beloved kindergarten teacher wouldn’t be there when I moved on to the first grade. (Man, was that ever traumatic!)
But the thing that really gripes me about these landscape changes is the sense of inevitability that surrounds them. No, more than inevitability… impotence. The feeling that there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, that no one else cares and that there’s something downright odd about my emotions on this subject. It often seems like I’m a lone voice shouting into the wind, and all the reasonable people can’t wait to see that nasty old stuff bulldozed so they can on with the all-important business of shopping.
Every once in a while, however, there comes a moment when I find I’m not the only voice, when the investors and developers are shocked to learn that a sizable number of citizens oppose their plans, and they’re forced to reconsider the value of old things. Case in point: the LDS Church, which had planned to demolish the historic First Security Building in downtown Salt Lake as part of its new City Creek Center development, announced in December that, due to public outcry, the 87-year-old tower would be preserved after all. I was — and still am — elated by this news.
I should explain for my out-of-town readers that the Church owns several blocks of downtown real estate that radiate outward from Temple Square, the very center of both Salt Lake City and the Mormon faith. Two of these blocks are currently occupied by moribund shopping malls, the ZCMI Center and Crossroads Mall, which were built in the early 1980s and have both been in decline for years. As part of the city’s ongoing effort to revitalize downtown — which is virtually deserted after 6 PM and on weekends — the Church has planned to replace these malls with a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly complex of shopping, restaurants, housing, and office space, the aforementioned City Creek development.
In general, I support these plans. Although I have fond memories of hanging at Crossroads when I was a teenager, the existing malls are depressing, decaying eyesores, and downtown on a Saturday is like the opening scenes of The Omega Man. I’d love to see Main Street bustling with activity like 16th Street in Denver, and I have hopes that City Creek Center might lead Salt Lake in that direction. The problem is that the malls aren’t the only structures on those blocks.
The First Security Building — originally known as the Deseret Building because it housed the Deseret National Bank — has stood at the corner of First South and Main since 1919. To be honest, it’s not one of my favorite buildings in Salt Lake. Its facade has some interesting decorative elements, but it’s really something of a plain-jane in my eyes, at least compared to the spectacular Boston and Newhouse Buildings a few blocks south. For me, its most appealing element is the big red neon First Security Bank sign on the roof, which I believe dates to the ’40s or maybe early ’50s. First Security Bank ceased to exist a long time ago, but the sign has been glowing away up there for so long that Salt Lake would look really strange without it, like there’s a hole in the skyline. Plus, there’s the principle of the thing to consider: the building is one of the few oldies left right in the very heart of downtown. Most everything else of its vintage — or of any vintage before 1980 — came down when Crossroads and ZCMI were built. I believe that alone is cause enough to save it.
At this point, the Church isn’t entirely sure what to actually do with the building, since the original plan was to put a big office tower on that corner. Personally, I think it would make for some spectacular residential space. I’d love to walk through the marble-tiled lobby every evening on my way upstairs to a condo or apartment, and to give directions to my place by teling people to look for that awesome antique neon sign. We’ll have to wait and see what actually happens to the old girl, but the important thing is that the preservationists actually won for a change.
Of course, you win one, you lose one. The Inn at Temple Square, a beautiful ’30s-vintage hotel that also stood in the way of the City Creek development, is already gone, razed just before the holidays. Given a choice between it and the First Security, I’d rather have my magnificent neon, but in an ideal world, there would’ve been room at City Creek for both.
You cite the 16th Street Mall in Denver as an example of responsible development in an urban area. Well, I grew up in Denver (I am now 65) and I watched the city tear down every building worth preserving during the 1970s to make room for their beloved Mall.
In particular, we lost some of the finest movie palaces I’ve ever seen. The Denver Theater rivaled Radio City Music Hall for opulence. It was like an opera house inside. The last time I saw the site of the Denver Theater, it was a parking lot.
Across the street from the site of the Denver, the city preserved a second-rate palace called the Paramount; and even then, they tore out the front entrance on 16th Street, and converted an old side exit into a new entrance.
We also lost the RKO Orpheum, the Denham, the Broadway, and especially the Tabor, a 19th century opera house built by Baby Doe Tabor during the great mining boom of the late 19th Century. That was torn down to create the insipid “Tabor Center”. Nearly every fine old building in downtown Denver was ripped out in the name of progress.
I’ve never been to the 16th Street Mall, other than to drive by on the cross streets. It always makes me want to cry.
Downtown Portland Oregon is a place that has tried to do it right. (Although old-time Portlanders might disagree.) They’ve preserved many of their fine old buildings. The old Portland Theater movie palace was renovated by the owners of Schnitzer Steel and became the Schnitzer Concert Hall.
When you go to downtown Portland, you don’t have the feeling that the place got put up day before yesterday.
Wow. I didn’t know the sad history of 16th Street before tonight, John; I was speaking as a tourist who visited the place one afternoon a few years ago and found it reasonably pleasant. Obviously I didn’t realize what I was looking at or what was lost to create it. Thanks for setting me straight.
As a lover of the old-fashioned cinema-going experience, whose own local movie palaces are now gone, I find the losses of all those theaters you describe especially tragic. I’m sorry about them, and also for touching what’s obviously a sore spot for you.
However, the point I was trying to make when I mentioned 16th Street wasn’t that I think it’s a pattern to be copied, only that I’d like to see downtown Salt Lake become a popular destination as 16th Street seemed to be the day I was there. I was thinking of the foot traffic and the vibrant atmosphere I saw (both of which Salt Lake’s Main Street lacks), not of the architecture or history of the place.
It wouldn’t matter even if the City Creek developers followed Denver’s example to the letter, though. We unfortunately don’t have the option of doing something like Portland’s preservation-minded redevelopment, because most of the historic structures in the downtown area are already gone. They were lost 25 years ago to make way for the two malls that are now themselves scheduled for demolition.
I wonder what the folks who were around when all these classic buildings went up were thinking. They were probably upset to see whatever they replaced go (even if it was a big, open field).
If it helps any, someone’s grandkid will probably speak of the City Creek mall one day with same nostalgia & reverence with which you speak of the neon sign.
The whole thing reminds me of the renovation they did to Grand Central Station a few years back. There was a mechanical sign that announced the incoming trains there (one of those signs where each letter is on a spinner, so that changing trains involves lots of spinning & clicking while the new letters find their required positions).
Anyway, the plan called for replacing the sign with a more modern, electronic sign (I believe it was LED at the time – not the HD/Plasma screen you’d expect to see today). A group who regularly advocated for the preservation of city landmarks held a protest in GCS to try and save the old sign, at which point a city official pointed out that the sign had only been installed about 20 years earlier (and had been replaced every couple of decades ever since GCS was built). The group promptly dropped their protest…
Brian, I would guess that the preservationist impulse is a fairly recent development. Browse through an old magazine sometime, especially those from the post-World War II era, and you’ll see that those earlier generations you mentioned had a much more positive view of growth and redevelopment than we (at least some of us) do now. The tone of the ads, in particular, always implies (or even explicitly states) that new is better than old.
My own personal theory for what has changed in our society (you knew I’d have a theory, right?) is that the limitations of modernist and postmodernist design have people feeling nostalgic for the aesthetics of earlier generations. Consider: commercial architecture since about the mid-50s has been largely unadorned, purely functional, and aesthetically cold (I’m thinking primarily of all those featureless glass-and-metal skyscrapers, but even humble everyday buildings like grocery stores, restaurants, and gas stations are little more than plain rectangular boxes), or it’s become downright weird, as in the case of everything ever touched by Frank Gehry.
By contrast, the buildings of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s — what you rightly called the classics — are far more decorative, humanistic, and beautiful. To put it another way, they’ve got style.
The suburbs are part of the problem, too. While the “Greatest Generation” saw them as a salvation from crowded, polluted, crime-ridden urban areas — a chance for a man to own his own home and have a lawn for his kids to play on — we’ve now realize that they have problems of their own, including (but not limited to) the cookie-cutter sameness of tract housing and strip malls and various infrastructure issues.
Nostalgia is no doubt a part of the equation — ours is an unusually nostalgic moment in history — but I think the big issue is simply that post-War trends have led us into a dead-end and we’re now looking for a way to get back whatever it was we lost.
As to whether the grandkids will admire what we’re building now, we’ll see. I personally suspect that they won’t, because nothing these days seems to last that long anymore. Crossroads and ZCMI are the perfect examples — they’re only about 20 or 25 years old, and they’re coming. As the old saw goes, they don’t build ’em like they used to.
Oh, that bit about the sign at Grand Central Station? Priceless… education is part of the equation, too, since people often get sentimental over things they don’t know much about. I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve done the same…