In the beginning, it was — naturally — East Temple Street.
Not until 1906 did Salt Lake's city fathers, aware that business development was following a natural course south from the temple block, change the appellation to Main Street. And since then, this pivot point of downtown commerce has had more face lifts than a Hollywood star.
"Cities tend to change their image about once in every generation," says Ted Wilson, who as mayor in the 1980s was involved in some of that change. Now, he's director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute for Politics and, as a native Salt Laker, he's watched the shifting face of the city's downtown with interest.
Latest in the string of special projects focused on keeping Main in tune with the times is the announcement this past week of plans to raze buildings, raise buildings and renew buildings along the west side of Main from 200 to 300 South. The plans call for leveling two old structures between the old Continental Bank Building (now the Monaco Hotel) and the Karrick Building at 236 S. Main.
Renovation will preserve the Karrick and the Lollin buildings next door. Both small buildings were constructed in the 19th century, the Karrick in 1887 and the Lollin in 1894, when downtown Salt Lake City was developing a character of its own.
Chicago-based Hamilton Partners L.L.P. will do the renovation work.
Temporary housing for some Olympic functions and the longer-range glimmering of a 24-story office building also are in the works.
Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson and the builders see the plans as part of a drive to present a thriving, viable downtown to the world when it visits for the 2002 Winter Games. But in the kaleidoscope of history, it's just another turn of the cylinder.
The first commerce in the infant Great Salt Lake City was not on Main Street. Entrepreneurs James A. Livingston and Charles A. Kincaid set up shop on West Temple near the site where West High School later would be built. But south of the temple block was the direction generally dictated by Salt Lake City's geography for businesses.
The west side of East Temple (Main Street) was the city's first business district, and it was about a block long. The east side gradually was taken over by businesses as well. The home of Mayor Daniel H. Wells, on the southeast corner of South Temple and East Temple, was the last holdout residential property. In 1889, it gave way for more business development.
By 1900, recently validated by statehood (1896) and with steadily climbing population, Salt Lake City (the Great was dropped in 1868) had a thriving "downtown," stretching from South Temple to 400 South. Among the businesses were the old ZCMI cooperative, a variety of merchants, 10 cigar factories and the Keeley Institute for "cure of drunkenness, opium, cocaine, cigarette and tobacco habits."
Electricity had come to town and electric streetcars toted 10,000 persons per day. A spider web of telephone and electric lines strung from a line of poles meshed the skyline, while a maze of car tracks took up much of Main Street's width. The old American Theater opened at 243 S. Main, advertising itself as having the largest seating capacity in the world for the growing ranks of movie buffs.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Salt Lake City had quit trying to be different from the rest of the country and was competing to be the same. High-rise buildings were the thing. The six-story Deseret News building on the southwest corner of East Temple and South Temple, completed in 1902 and later known as the Union Pacific Building, became the "northern boundary of the central business district," according to historian John S. McCormick, author of "Salt Lake City: The Gathering Place."
Many of the typical, classic old buildings built during this expansion era disappeared behind artificial facades in the 1950s and thereafter in the name of modernization, to the chagrin of architectural historians who preferred the older styles.
World War II brought a temporary halt to Main Street expansion, but in the two decades after the war, a new wave of development began. The nature of cities changed here and across the country with the "flight to the suburbs." In many cities, "downtown" became an anachronism, and city officials struggled to find ways to keep their core areas from being buried by blight.
Among factors that pushed change in downtown Salt Lake City was the changing habits of its residents. They had given up being pedestrians in favor of using the family auto for every travel occasion. Traffic clogged downtown streets and the problem of where to put vehicles when they were not in use spiraled.
"I can remember in the 1940s going downtown with my parents, and there was angle parking all down Main Street," Wilson said. That was part of the "car era" in the city. Over the years, the number of vehicles outstripped the capacity even of angle parking. Off-street parking and covered ramps proliferated.
Some of the changes in Salt Lake City's downtown were dictated by new Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on air pollution. Discouraging vehicle traffic was one of the approaches to reducing pollutants. But when Mayor Jake Garn, Wilson's predecessor, suggested banning vehicle traffic downtown outright, there was "a battle royal," Wilson recalled.
The next best thing was to narrow the vehicle corridor and make the streets less attractive to motorists, Wilson said. The efforts made the EPA happier, "but it made (the streets) a horror to drive down."
To help make downtown more attractive in its bid to compete with the suburban malls that were siphoning off the trade, Garn spearheaded a beautification project in the 1970s. Sidewalk planter boxes sprouted trees and flowers. Sidewalk brickwork — faux cobblestones — added character to sidewalks. Concrete boluses at street intersections, intended to keep vehicle traffic in the street where it belonged, became stumbling blocks to "more than one poor citizen," Wilson said.
Main Street planners are constantly balancing the interests of pedestrians against those of vehicles, he said. Salt Lake City's wide streets are not really conducive to pedestrian traffic. "We brag about our wide streets, but they are very intimidating to pedestrians. It takes a world-class sprinter to make it across in the time allowed," he said.
Revitalization of Salt Lake City and other urban centers took a sharp upswing when government got into the picture. A spate of federal programs under the umbrella of "urban renewal" came into being, although "there wasn't a whole lot of federal money available," Wilson said.
In the early 1970s, the Legislature passed a redevelopment act that allowed cities to set up redevelopment agencies (RDAs.) They were given broad powers to declare selected areas "blighted" and to condemn them if necessary to promote upgrading. They were allowed to offer tax incentives to businesses that would move into such areas. Salt Lake's RDA identified more than two dozen blocks downtown for redevelopment consideration.
Three decades of planning and new construction have resulted in bushels of paperwork and some significant improvement along Main Street, to the point that some critics now say the downtown area is overbuilt, with office space and motel rooms languishing.
Progress hasn't always been easy. Declarations of blight haven't always been well received by existing property owners, and some grandiose planning has died on the vine because of a lack of private money to back it.
"Urban planners always look at things as if the private sector were not involved," Wilson said. While the planners propose, it's the folks with the money who must dispose.
Many projects announced in bold headlines limped into obscurity.
In fact, earlier plans for refurbishing the east side of Block 58 — that area targeted this week for an upgrade— were shot down by the landowners in the early 1980s. "They don't want to fall so complex can rise," a Deseret News headline announced in November 1981.
But the block did see the rise of the American Plaza buildings, and some unsightly old buildings along West Temple were gone. That kind of win-a-little, lose-a-little evolution is bound to continue along Salt Lake City's Main Street, Wilson said. Like the mid-street rail lines that came, left and returned, nothing on the street can be considered permanent.
So don't ever get too used to Main Street as it is at any given moment. Tomorrow it will be different.
E-mail: tvanleer@desnews.com