Downtown Rising

As you may know, I work right in the heart of downtown Salt Lake, Construction Capitol of the State (probably pretty close to World though...). It seems there is nowhere to park for more than an hour, fewer good places to eat, more cranes, LOTS of orange, and smaller sidewalks. I have often wondered what our good city will look like when the cranes pack up and leave, construction workers start being "laid off", Nordstrom returns (yay!), and the buses can once again pull up on State Street right next to the new Key Bank building. Today in our company meeting, my expectations were exceeded (one of Deseret Mutual's Core Values). Members of the City Creek Rising Inc. spoke to us about the changes we will be seeing here downtown. They talked about Residential areas (right next to work? sign me up!), new restaurants, shopping, etc. aided by colored diagrams and computerized blueprints (if you will) of what areas of our building will look like. Then, as I said, they exceeded my expecations. There was a virtual tour of what the finished product is expected to look like. I'm very excited about it. City Creek is going to run right through it, there are retractable glass roofs (not just on the two-story skywalk either), retail stores, a food court (hopefully better than what we have now) with 12 vendors, and on and on and on. So, I'm exceeding your expectations (that means you can nominate me for an award at work...) and putting the link here in my blog. Watch the conceptual tour. (It starts at Temple Square and goes down through Main Street, circles around "Richards Court" and winds its way around from there. I'm also extremely excited about the new Harmon's grocery store (some 50,000 sq ft) on the Southeast side of State Street. Here it is:

http://www.downtownrising.com/city_creek/

It reminds me of other big cities you only see on t.v. or on fancy vacations. The City Creek Rising Inc. representatives mentioned that 25% of people from outside of Utah were expected to move in to the residential areas originally, though that figure has significantly increased since the beginning of the project. This alone is enough to keep me in Utah. Oh, and the best part is, while the final completion date is set for 2012, parts of it will be complete late 2008-early 2009. If only the building doesn't fall over into the 55-ft deep hole they are digging out of the now Food Court. For a time, there will be a good 9 cranes on our block. Hopefully the operators don't want to play "Chicken" with the cranes and take out a few buildings in their wake.