City Creek and Main Street, at street level.

The roof was the first fully retractable glass roof built over a shopping centre anywhere in the United States. It runs more than five hundred feet, it opens or closes in about six minutes at a rate of roughly eight feet a minute, and it is carried on thirty six structural steel ribs shaped like whalebones. Around two million pounds of structural steel were fabricated for the system, and it is run from a remote control room by an industrial computer rather than by anybody standing underneath it. On a February afternoon it is shut and the walkways are warm. On a June evening it is open and you are outside.

The creek is the other piece. About twelve hundred feet of recreated stream runs the length of the property through roughly six acres of green space, with two waterfalls of eighteen feet, on a recirculating system. It traces the historic course of City Creek, which is the water the 1847 survey was drawn around and which now spends most of its lower miles in a culvert. Whatever you make of a shopping centre, restoring a creek through the middle of one is a more interesting decision than it had to be.

The pedestrian bridge over Main Street weighs three hundred and twenty thousand pounds, has openable roof panels and etched glass walls, and connects the two halves at upper level. Retail runs to about eight hundred and ninety thousand square feet with Nordstrom at a hundred and twenty five thousand and Macy's at a hundred and fifty five thousand. The grocery, Harmons, sits at the east end, reached through a tunnel under State Street.

People live here too, which is the part visitors miss. Roughly seven hundred homes sit in and above the development: 99 West at thirty storeys on South Temple, Richards Court as a pair of ten storey towers at the west end, and The Regent at around twenty storeys further east. A fourth tower called Cascade was never finished; only the foundation and three floors were built, which is a fact you would never guess from the street.

Two blocks east and south of the Walker Center, off Main between 300 and 400 South, sits Exchange Place, and it is the strangest few hundred feet of architecture in the city because it was built to compete with the blocks you have just walked. Samuel Newhouse, a mining financier from a European Jewish immigrant family who came to Utah in 1896, began a building programme in 1907 with the explicit intention of shifting the commercial centre of Salt Lake City south, away from the concentration of business at the Temple Square end.

The two buildings that anchor it are the Boston Building and the Newhouse Building, both eleven storeys, both begun in 1907 and finished in 1909, both designed by the Chicago and New York architect Henry Ives Cobb. They were the city's first skyscrapers and they face each other across the street as a matched pair, which is not an accident but a statement.

The rest of the plan failed. A grand tower that was meant to top the district was never built, the centre of gravity stayed where it was, and Newhouse's second downtown ended up as a compact pocket rather than a rival. What that failure preserved is unusual: a small, largely intact block of 1900s commercial architecture that never got redeveloped because nothing much ever happened to it. It is a National Register historic district now, and it is three minutes off Main.

The Main Street Promenade study, branded Together on Main, was released in May 2024 after a nine month process. It covers four blocks of Main from South Temple to 400 South plus a block of 100 South running west to West Temple, and it proposes a pedestrian first street with a much larger tree canopy, new lighting and paving, block by block identities, and light rail retained rather than removed. The estimated capital cost is around 125 million dollars, averaging about 25 million a block, and it is framed as a multi generational investment rather than a project with an opening date.

The public appetite is not in doubt. Surveying done around the summer street closures found nearly seventy four percent of respondents preferred keeping Main Street closed to cars permanently. What is missing is a binding decision: as of August 2026 the promenade remains a conceptual study, the city's own material says no construction timeline has been set, and there is no council vote approving a build.

A new obstacle arrived in 2026. On the final day of the legislative session the state passed SB242, by fifty five to fourteen in the House after twenty to seven in the Senate, giving the Utah Department of Transportation approval power over city initiated projects on city controlled streets, with Main Street named. Traffic calming and lane reductions are barred outright on the highest tier roads and require state approval elsewhere. Whatever you think of the promenade, that law changes who gets to decide it.

In the meantime the street has been closed in summer under the Open Streets programme, which through June 2025 ran every Friday and Saturday from two in the afternoon until two in the morning across the same four blocks, divided into themed zones. A 2026 season was not confirmed on the city's own pages when this was written, so check slc.gov for the current programme rather than assuming it runs.