The Gateway to Salt Lake City’s Future Jake Boyer | developer, The Boyer Company Point of View: Much maligned—even by myself—The Gateway is really an excellent example of the kind of dedication and imagination that downtown Salt Lake City needs if it is going to remain viable. By DUSTIN TYLER JOYCE | URBPL 2010 | TUESDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2004

OO BIG. Out of place. Out of scale. The new downtown. The replacement for downtown. Disneyland. These are just a few of the words that have been used to describe The Gateway, the mixed-use development built by The Boyer Company on downtown Salt Lake City’s west end.

How would I describe it after hearing from Jake Boyer? Pretty dang amazing. After all, to have built all of that, with all of those features—retail, office, a variety of housing, cultural amenities ranging from theaters to museums, the Olympic Legacy Plaza, and the restored Union Pacific Depot—on brownfields that were formerly Union Pacific’s railyards is impressive. The goals the company had in building it—bringing people back to downtown, restoring one of Salt Lake City’s most significant historic landmarks, using land that had previously been considered useless—and believing that doing such a thing could be profitable for the company, its tenants, and the city is admirable. And, let’s face it, they did something downtown that other people only dream and talk about doing. And yet we—myself included—criticize them for it. It doesn’t fit in with the rest of Salt Lake City. It robs stores and, therefore, people from Main Street. (As one classmate put it last spring, “I don’t see why they needed to build an outdoor mall. We already had an outdoor mall. It’s called Main Street.”) It looks like Disneyland. The most surprising thing? Jake Boyer probably agrees—almost wholeheartedly, it seems—with all of the above assessments. You notice that he was even willing to say it when we were trying to beat around the bush? He’s probably used to it. He admitted that there were things even he didn’t like about it. But, all in all, it became apparent that it was a project that he felt strongly about and that he believed in—after all, juggling architects and engineers and tenants and 55 contractors and finances and brownfield clean up and historic preservation in time for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games is almost as busy as being a college student, except he got paid to do it. Every time I go to The Gateway, I feel a bit out of place. Are Bermuda shorts and a bulky camera slung around the neck required apparel? Where are the ticket booths—you do have to pay for admission to this amusement park, don’t you? Did they change Main Street’s name to Rio Grande Street? And, yet, despite the fact that it’s not politically chic to say this in this town, I like The Gateway. I enjoy reliving the Olympics with the music and water show on the hour and half-hour throughout the day. I appreciate the fact that there’s at least one place in downtown Salt Lake City other than Temple Square where there are actually people walking around, outside no less. (Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy Temple Square. But the only kind of girls there—namely, sister missionaries—are the kind you shouldn’t be checking out.) And even I can admit that, though not perfect, the architecture of The Gateway is bearable and, at the least, fun. I mean, if the architecture weren’t fun, nobody would be comparing it to Disneyland. (Which makes me think of a good point—is there actually any place at Disneyland that looks like that? Not that I’ve ever seen….) And maybe I believe propaganda more than I would like to think, but after hearing from Jake Boyer last Thursday, I like The Gateway even more. They believe in it, and it’s worked thus far, so I can believe in it, too. But they believe in something greater. They believe in Salt Lake City and its downtown. They believe that it is not only the heart of this valley but the heart of this state and this region and that, like a human, this region is only as alive as its heart. They believe that it’s worth the time, the money, the effort—the investment. They believe that stores and restaurants and cultural amenities will come back to it, and that people will, too. They believe that the future of this place depends upon the future of downtown, and they’ve gone as far as to make a large-scale working model of a way to ensure downtown’s future. And they believe that you can even make a profit off of it. So I can believe in it, too.

T