The City Creek Center is a mixed-use development with a shopping center, office and residential buildings, fountain, and simulated creek near Temple Square indowntown Salt Lake City, Utah. It is an undertaking by Property Reserve, Inc. (the commercial real estate division of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and Taubman Centers, Inc. The center integrates shopping and residential elements, with foliage-lined walkways and streams covering three blocks in the heart of downtown Salt Lake. The City Creek Center opened to the general public on March 22, 2012. This shopping, office and residential center encompass nearly 20 acres (8.1 ha) of downtown Salt Lake City.  The City Creek Center is part of an estimated $5 billion sustainable design project to revitalize downtown Salt Lake City.  The City Creek Center project itself has been estimated to cost around $1.5 billion.

I love how they imprinted animal footprints in the ground, as if wild animals ran through City Creek during the night and left their prints. Plaques describe the animal and shows the print so you can look for that animal’s prints.

Development of the City Creek Center began in 2003, when a for-profit company owned by the LDS Church purchased the Crossroads Plaza Mall, a shopping center on the west side of Main Street from the ZCMI Center Mall. Both malls (known unofficially as the “Main Street Malls”) had been constructed in the 1970s and had begun to drop in sales figures by the late 1990s as a result of competition from rival centers in Salt Lake City’s suburbs. In 2001, the Boyer Company completed its new open-air Gateway Mall, a scant four blocks to the west of Crossroads and ZCMI, drawing even more business away from Main Street. Soon after, the Nordstrom store at Crossroads announced its intentions to leave the mall and open a new store at Gateway. When the owners of the mall proved unable and unwilling to persuade the store to stay on Main Street, the LDS Church decided in 2003 to purchase the mall and redevelop the area in an effort to revitalize downtown Salt Lake City and keep the properties surrounding the church’s world headquarters at Temple Square economically vibrant. The church enlisted the help of nationally renowned mall developer Taubman Centers, Inc. to help it redesign the malls into a single project and recruit retailers to fill it. In October 2006, the concept design of City Creek Center was announced. A Ribbon-cutting ceremony with a large crowd and the media on hand took place on 22 March 2012.

A couple more pictures:

Note the incredible detail:
The ripples underneath the walkway between the two blocks give the illusion that the creek continues over the street between the two city blocks.

The ripples of the creek can even be seen in the metal plates on walkways.

Even the waste can receptacles are given meticulous attention to their detail with tall grass cut-outs on the cans.

The walkway glass is etched with the appearance of trees and leaves to continue the natural landscape over the city street.

And one of my favorite details are the various footprints appearing randomly around City Creek Center, making one think that animals left their prints sometime in the early hours of the morning as they came to get a drink from the creek before anyone came around.

City Creek with fish.

And a little history:

The original store front of the first ZCMI in downtown Salt Lake City:

AND there are some incredible stores at the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City. Here is the Porsche Design Store.