Downtown Salt Lake City
This enabled new settlers to have the food and products they needed after they made the rigorous journey to Salt Lake City.
But prostitution continued beyond Commercial Street in brothels in other areas as well such as Plum Alley, which was Salt Lake City's China Town.
Brigham Young, Jr., then a church Apostle and vice president of the bank, temporarily resigned over the matter, until the building was later sold.
Salt Lake City boomed in the years before World War I and the center of mass of downtown was pulled southward by the efforts of Samuel Newhouse and other non-LDS community members.
In 1912, at the intersection of Main Street and 200 South, police officer Lester Wire installed his homemade electric traffic light, the first of its kind in the world.
[1] Salt Lake had an extensive streetcar network at the time and Trolley Square served as its main depot for years before the gradual removal of the system that came with the rise of the automobile.
From 1970 to 1976 the Central Main Street shopping district saw a dramatic shift from the South-end (near Exchange Place and Broadway) to the North-end (near the L.D.S Temple).
This shift was the result of a change in buying patterns, with shoppers preferring malls rather than on-street department stores.
Following the completion of the Crossroads Mall, the south-end of Main Street collapsed, beginning with 117-year-old merchant Auerbachs Department Store.
In the 1980s, a Saudi businessman, Adnan Khashoggi, had a vision of turning Salt Lake City into a major business hub.
Khashoggi was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal and his assets were frozen by the Federal government and the skyscrapers were never built, leaving the current Triad Center with only buildings 3, 4 and 5.
The Gateway, a large outdoor, pedestrian-oriented mall, was built around the historic Union Pacific Depot and hosts the Salt Lake Olympic Plaza.
The TRAX light rail system was built in the years leading up to the Olympics and directly connects downtown to the University of Utah, Salt Lake International Airport, and many of the suburbs including South Salt Lake, West Valley City, Murray, and Draper.
The development included nearly 725,000 sq ft (67,400 m2) of retail space, new and refurbished office towers, new residential buildings, and a full-service grocery store.
[7] Pioneer Park, on the western edge of downtown, developed a reputation as one of the most crime-ridden areas of the state, and as having a large number of drug dealers.
After the controversial Operation Rio Grande, which began in 2017, and the closure and demolition of the Road Home homeless shelter in 2019 and 2020, respectively, the Pioneer Park area has begun to see a dramatic reduction in crime and a resulting trend of gentrification.
