How a shopping center became the anchor of Salt Lake City’s downtown

As she searched for a home for her new beauty salon, Heather “MizzJ” Jefferson cast a wide net. The shopping center in downtown Salt Lake City would be “amazing,” she said, but the odds of finding a space in City Creek Center seemed low. Still, she made some calls.

“It was like divine timing,” Jefferson said. City Creek just had a storefront open up, Jefferson was told.

On June 1, four months after that initial inquiry, Jefferson opened the doors to BO Beauty Studio by Mizz J in City Creek Center, and became the center’s first Black-owned business. The person who first told Jefferson about the space — Cheri Baker, leasing agent for City Creek’s manager, Taubman Realty Group — now visits as a client.

“They’ve been nothing but supportive,” Jefferson said of Baker and her contacts at Taubman. (Baker declined an interview request.)

Jefferson said she hopes her presence there can challenge any lingering reputation the shopping center — which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — may have as “stuffy” or conservative.

“We love to have fun in here,” she said.

It’s a reputation Jefferson said she’s heard before. But her impression of City Creek, even before moving in, was as a hub for visitors to downtown Salt Lake City.

City Creek Center, which opened in March 2012 and is named for the creek that flows through its main hall, spans three city blocks across from the church’s Temple Square. The retail and restaurant center has become the “epicenter” of downtown, said Dee Brewer, executive director of the Downtown Alliance — and that was by design.

Brewer acknowledged that its reputation may have once been “the mall that the church built.” However, he said, “People’s experience there and the success of the center tell a more nuanced story. The LDS Church made an investment in their immediate neighborhood.”

And in a city that reimagines its downtown roughly once a decade, City Creek seems poised to maintain its position as Salt Lake City’s central artery, Brewer said — even as other downtown malls, such as Chicago’s Water Tower Place, struggle to stay relevant.

Looking in

City Creek Center occupies both sides of Main Street between South Temple and 100 South. But most visitors need not step foot onto Main Street to get across. Instead, they can cross the shopping center’s skybridge, which takes them above Main Street’s TRAX stop and narrow traffic lanes.

It’s a design that has been criticized for being too insular — isolating City Creek shoppers, rather than connecting them to the rest of downtown.

The skybridge “privatize[s] the public way,” Stephen Goldsmith, the city planner when City Creek drew up its plans, said in 2015. “It creates a ‘we-they.’”

A block south of City Creek’s southern boundary, Martin Norman calls the City Creek corridor “the bubble.” But he and his shop, Uniquely Utah Souvenir Shop, are part of that bubble, Norman said. It’s why he moved into the space on 122 S. Main — to be under it.

Norman opened his shop at the height of the pandemic. It was 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were just starting to roll out and he was trying to sell locally made souvenirs to tourists who did not really exist. He made $20 his first day open, he said.

Now, Norman said, he’s “busy all the time.”

City Creek is part of the growth, he said. Uniquely Utah is younger than City Creek Center, so Norman cannot measure the shopping center’s impact on sales directly, he said. But the store gets plenty of City Creek shoppers, directed by signs across the street on 100 South.

Other neighboring shop employees, who weren’t authorized to talk to the press but spoke on background, agreed that City Creek feeds them business. A Beerhive Pub bartender said plenty of patrons are City Creek shoppers or employees who come thirsty after a day of work or shopping.

But City Creek, they all said, is just part of the equation.

Norman can’t say, for example, whether the fact that Sunday — when the church-owned shopping center is closed — is his busiest day is evidence for or against City Creek’s influence. Maybe shoppers end up at his souvenir store because they can’t shop across the street, Norman said, or maybe there are just more visitors out on Sundays.

Retail’s rise and fall

The bigger factor in business success in the past decade, Norman and his neighbors all said, was the pandemic. At Edinburgh Castle Scottish Imports, a few doors down from City Creek on Main Street, store owner Debi Raskey said she measures time now according to the pandemic: before it, during its peak, and now, in its wake.

By the numbers, Salt Lake City’s retail success during and after the pandemic looks a lot like it did before and after City Creek opened.

The year City Creek opened, 2012, was the second year on record since 1998 that gross taxable sales downtown surpassed $1 billion, according to state data. The first was in 2008, at the peak of the recession but before its impact caught up with retail. Taxable sales dropped to $800 million in 2009, the lowest in three years.

Sales grew, steadily, the following years. And, in 2012, they again topped $1 billion — a benchmark that lasted nearly a decade, until COVID-19 brought a sharp decline in 2020.

As in the recession’s wake, taxable sales downtown have climbed steadily each year since 2020, according to state data.

Retail sales, specifically, have not been so nimble. In City Creek’s ZIP code, sales decreased again in 2023, even as total tax revenue increased.

Brewer said there is no question City Creek has been a “major contributor to the city’s coffers.”

A few blocks away, Salt Lake City’s older downtown shopping center was not so lucky. The Gateway sold in 2016 to Arizona’s Vestar after store vacancies reached a record low — and the space is now primarily occupied by offices and eateries.

City Creek offers something The Gateway didn’t, Brewer said: diversity.

City Creek has always been “well merchandised,” Brewer said, but it also includes residential apartments and dining. When the Harmons grocery chain opened a supermarket at City Creek’s eastern edge in 2013, Brewer said, the downtown “bubble” became its own little ecosystem, where visitors and residents alike could access everything they needed in roughly four square city blocks.

(The Gateway, which opened in 2001, also has residential apartments, but for years had no grocery store. In 2019, The Gateway added a boutique grocery, The Store, but at 9,000 square feet, it’s small compared to the City Creek Harmons, which covers about 70,000 square feet.)

City Creek “leveraged the existing core of downtown,” Brewer said. “Salt Lake City is the heart of the state. Main Street is the heart of the city.”

And as insular as City Creek may be, Jefferson said, most of her business in the beginning was from walk-in clients who came in off the street or found her on Google because she was the only salon nearby. Now, she said, it’s roughly half and half: people who found her and people who already know she’s there.

Downtown déjà vu

As it does roughly every decade, downtown Salt Lake City now stands at the precipice of its next big rebrand.

The city’s new National Hockey League franchise, temporarily called the Utah Hockey Club, starts playing at the Delta Center this fall, and Ryan Smith — who owns both the hockey team and the NBA’s Utah Jazz — has big plans to transform the area surrounding the Delta Center into a sports and entertainment district. Smith Entertainment Group’s proposed project has received the City Council’s initial green light and awaits state approval.

City Creek would bookend the new district on the east.

Linda Wardell, the shopping center’s general manager, said City Creek is ready for the change. It has already “played a key role in revitalizing and strengthening the downtown core of Salt Lake City and its environment,” Wardell said in a statement.

City Creek does not have a direct working relationship with the Smith Entertainment Group, Wardell said, but does have “a shared interest in continuing to make the downtown area a great place to live, work, and be part of the community.”

“We are grateful,” she said, “for their efforts to create a more cohesive, coordinated and planned downtown district that works for everyone.”

Norman, too, is excited for downtown’s next chapter.

“Anything to bring more people downtown,” he said. “It can only go up from here.”

The city also has the 2034 Winter Olympics to prepare for, housing to build and pedestrian improvements — all of which could affect the downtown shopping center, Brewer said, but for which it is “well positioned” to handle.

“It’s positive growth to have residents and more people waking up downtown — living their lives, walking their dogs, going to the grocery store,” Brewer said. City Creek is “one of the charms on the bracelet we have to thread together.”

“This is a city in ascension,” Brewer said. “It’s a city others are looking at to understand what is working here.” City Creek, he added, is something that’s working here.

Shannon Sollitt is a Report for America corps member covering business accountability and sustainability for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.