GATEWAY MALL: SALT LAKE CITY, UT
Kibu's Commentary:
(User submitted August 30, 2019)
Gateway mall is the perfect example of a good idea gone bad. It's one of those malls that could work in just about any other location; but the location is simply killing it.
The Gateway mall opened in 2001 in the Rio Grande District of Salt Lake City. at a time when the city was buzzing with anticipation for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Salt Lake City was starting to feel more cosmopolitan than it had ever before. The mall saw an initial boom that seemed to be sustainable. Built in a curious 'open air' design with roads and streets meandering through the mall property, the future looked great for the mall.
The popularity of Gateway may is tied to how Salt Lake City's other malls were floundering. On their last leg, ZCMI and Crossroads were themselves ghost malls. Trolley Square was undergoing major renovations. And the malls in the surrounding valley were also struggling. Fashion Place Mall was a construction zone, and Cottonwood mall was just a hole in the ground.
In 2012, City Creek Center opened. The shopping mall built by the business arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a game changer. A 110-store mega-mall that straddles Main Street on prime real estate next to Temple Square, the shiny new space with a retractable roof lured shops, like the Apple Store, into its halls. Fashion Place saw City Creek Center coming and stepped up with an H&M, and Crate & Barrel, and a Cheesecake Factory, and brought a lot of things to Utah that weren't here before. But The Gateway experienced an exodus, and the fate of the property was up in the air.
Walk through The Gateway, and you're likely to see as many vacant doors as you are businesses. Only two retailers remain on the second-floor circle that looks down onto the fountain: Barnes & Noble and a T-Mobile. Stretches of the mall give off a ghost town vibe. In places you can still find the old directories, listing numerous places that simply don't exist any longer. The food court, basically a collection of small restaurants, still does some business; but even then the income just isn't quite enough to justify the mall staying open. Yet, like some weird zombie, it trundles on, stuck in this weird limbo even as a new owner tries to revitalize it.
With a second, more popular mall less than a block away though... it's unlikely that Gateway will ever see the popularity it once did.
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