Heather “Ms. J” Jefferson looked far and wide for a new location for her hair salon. Though she thought the downtown Salt Lake City shopping center was “nice,” finding space at City Creek Center seemed unlikely. Still, she made some calls.
“It was like God’s timing,” Jefferson said. Jefferson was told City Creek had just opened a store.
On June 1, four months after that initial inquiry, Jefferson opened BO Beauty Studio by Ms. J at City Creek Center, becoming the center’s first Black-owned business. The person who first told Jefferson about the store, City Creek manager Sheri Baker, a leasing agent with Taubman Realty Group, now visits as a customer.
“They’ve always been supportive,” Jefferson said of Baker and his associates at Taubman. (Baker declined an interview request.)
Jefferson said he hopes he’s there to help dispel the shopping center, which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,’s persistent reputation as being “stuffy” or conservative.
“We love having fun here,” she said.
Jefferson said he’d heard the reputation before, but even before he moved here, City Creek had always seemed like a hub for tourists visiting downtown Salt Lake City.
Named for the creek that runs through its main hall, City Creek Center spans three blocks across from the church on Temple Square when it opened in March 2012. The retail and restaurant center has become the “epicenter” of downtown, says Dee Brewer, executive director of the Downtown Alliance. And that was by design.
Brewer acknowledged that the center may have had a reputation in the past as a “church-built mall,” but said the “people’s experiences there and the success of the center tell a more nuanced story: The LDS Church has invested in the neighborhood.”
And in a city that reimagines its downtown roughly once every decade, Brewer said, City Creek seems poised to maintain its position as Salt Lake City’s central artery even as other downtown malls, such as Chicago’s Water Tower Place, struggle to maintain their presence.
(Francisco Kyorses | The Salt Lake Tribune) Heather “Ms. J” Jefferson, left, owner of the newly opened BO Beauty Studio by Ms. J in City Creek Center, plans her day with manager Rosie Galvin on Tuesday, July 2, 2024.
Take a look
City Creek Center occupies both sides of Main Street between South Temple and 100 South, but most visitors can cross without stepping foot on Main Street, instead taking the shopping center’s skybridge over the TRAX stop and narrow lanes on Main Street.
The design has been criticized as being too insular, isolating City Creek shoppers rather than connecting them with the rest of downtown.
Skybridge “Privatization[s] “This is not a public right-of-way,” city planner Steven Goldsmith said in 2015, when City Creek was developing the plan. “It creates an us-versus-them dynamic.”
A block south of City Creek’s southern border, Martin Norman calls the City Creek corridor a “bubble.” But he and his store, Uniquely Utah Souvenir Shop, are part of that bubble, Norman said. That’s why he’s relocated to the space at 122 S. Main: to be beneath the bubble.
Norman opened his shop in the middle of the pandemic, in 2021, just as COVID-19 vaccines were being distributed, trying to sell locally made souvenirs to nonexistent tourists, and he said he made $20 in sales on his first day open.
Now, Norman said, he’s “always busy.”
City Creek is playing a part in that growth, he said, and because Utah is a younger city than City Creek Center, he can’t directly measure the shopping center’s impact on sales, but the store does see many City Creek shoppers drawn to it by the 100 South sign across the street.
Employees at nearby establishments who were not authorized to speak to reporters but spoke on the sidelines agreed that City Creek brings foot traffic to their establishments.A bartender at the Beer Hive Pub said many of the regulars are City Creek shoppers or employees who get thirsty after work or shopping.
But City Creek is only part of the equation, they all said.
Norman can’t say for sure whether the fact that the church-owned shopping center’s busiest day is Sunday, when it’s closed, is evidence or disproval of City Creek’s influence. He said it could be that shoppers can’t shop across the street and so end up going to his souvenir shop anyway, or that Sundays are simply a better day for business.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake City Tribune) Monday, Aug. 23, 2021, at City Creek Center in Salt Lake City.
The Rise and Fall of Retail
Norman and his neighbors all said the pandemic has been a big factor in their business’ success over the past decade. At Edinburgh Castle Scottish Imports, a few doors down from City Creek on Main Street, owner Debi Laskey said she’s clocking time now with the pandemic: before the pandemic, at its peak and now since.
By the numbers, Salt Lake City’s retail success during and after the pandemic looks much the same as it did before and after City Creek opened.
The year City Creek opened, 2012, marked only the second time since 1998 that downtown’s total taxable sales surpassed $1 billion. The first time was in 2008, at the peak of the recession but before its effects hit retail, according to state data. Taxable sales fell to $800 million in 2009, the lowest in three years.
Sales continued to grow steadily after that, topping $1 billion again in 2012. This record remained for nearly a decade until a steep decline in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19.
Downtown taxable sales have increased steadily every year since 2020, similar to the aftermath of the recession, according to state data.
Retail sales, in particular, weren’t as agile: In the City Creek ZIP code, sales fell again in 2023 despite an increase in total tax revenue.
Brewer said there’s no question that City Creek has “been a significant contributor to the city’s finances.”
An older shopping center a few blocks away in downtown Salt Lake City hasn’t been so lucky: The Gateway was sold to Arizona-based Vestar in 2016 after storefront vacancy rates hit an all-time low, and the space is now mostly occupied by offices and restaurants.
City Creek offers something Gateway doesn’t, Brewer said: variety.
City Creek has always been “good for goods,” but it also has housing and restaurants, Brewer said. When the Harmon’s grocery chain opened a supermarket on the eastern end of City Creek in 2013, the downtown “bubble” became its own little ecosystem, giving visitors and residents alike access to everything they need within about a four-block radius, Brewer said.
(The Gateway, which opened in 2001, also has residential apartments but didn’t have a grocery store for many years. In 2019, a boutique grocery store, The Store, opened in the Gateway, but at 9,000 square feet, it’s small compared to the roughly 70,000 square feet of City Creek Harmons.)
City Creek “took advantage of the existing core of downtown,” Brewer said. “Salt Lake City is the center of the state. Main Street is the heart of the city.”
Despite City Creek’s insular atmosphere, Jefferson says that initially, most of her clients were walk-ins off the street or who found her on Google because there was only one other salon nearby. Now, about half of the customers find her and the other half are people who already know about her.
Downtown Deja Vu
(Smith Entertainment Group) Site plan for the proposed Downtown Sports and Entertainment District.
As seems to happen roughly every decade, downtown Salt Lake City is on the brink of its next major rebranding.
The city’s new National Hockey League franchise, tentatively called the Utah Hockey Club, will begin playing games at the Delta Center this fall. Ryan Smith, who owns both the hockey team and the NBA’s Utah Jazz, has grand plans to transform the area around the Delta Center into a sports and entertainment district. Smith Entertainment Group’s proposed project has received initial approval from the City Council and is awaiting state approval.
City Creek will flank the eastern side of the new neighborhood.
Linda Wardell, the shopping center’s general manager, said City Creek is ready for change. The center has already “played a vital role in revitalizing and enhancing Salt Lake City’s downtown core and its environment,” Wardell said in a statement.
City Creek does not have a direct business relationship with Smith Entertainment Group, but “we have a shared interest in continuing to make the downtown area a great place to live, work and be part of the community,” Wardell said.
“We appreciate their efforts to create a more cohesive, coordinated and planned downtown district that works for everyone,” she said.
Norman, too, is excited about Downtown’s next chapter.
“Anything we can do to bring more people downtown,” he said. “It’s only going to go up from here.”
The city is also preparing for the 2034 Winter Olympics, building new housing and improving pedestrian streets, all of which could affect the downtown shopping center, but Brewer said the city is “well positioned to handle it.”
“It’s positive growth to have residents and more people waking up downtown, going about their daily lives, walking their dogs, going to the grocery store,” Brewer said, noting that City Creek is “one of the charms on the bracelet that we have to string together.”
“This is a city on the rise,” Brewer said, “and other cities are looking to understand what’s working here.” City Creek is something that’s working well here, Brewer added.
Shannon Sollitto is a Report for America corps member covering corporate accountability and sustainability for the Salt Lake Tribune. You can help her continue writing stories like this one by matching an RFA grant. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation of any amount by clicking here.
