I never used to be a fan of the plan to destroy the Salt Palace arena.
It all seemed so cavalier to me. Governments beg taxpayers for permission to spend money. They whine like children about how whatever project they intend to build is critical to the city's future. Then, 25 years later they smash it to pieces, sell autographed bricks from the rubble and whine about needing money for a new, larger, critical project.With the Salt Palace, the throwaway American society seemed to have perfected the disposable arena.
But that was before I read a 31-year-old feasibility study that was used to justify the arena's construction in the first place. Now, I feel chastened. Salt Lake County, it seems, never expected the arena to last until the mid-1990s, and it was upfront about that with the taxpayers who approved a $17 million bond issue to build it.
Sands Brooke, project manager for construction of the new Salt Palace convention facility, let me borrow the only known copy of the report, titled "The Missing Link." The title was supposed to underscore how Salt Lake City never could become the hub of a major metropolitan area without a modern arena and convention center.
The report compared other metropolitan areas of the day and noted what kinds of arenas everyone else was building. With an eye toward costs, the study then examined how large an arena Salt Lake County should build. Keep in mind, this was at a time when the city had no professional indoor teams. Arena proponents were thinking in terms of the circus and the Ice Capades. At the time, the population of the metropolitan area was listed as 383,035.
Would 8,000 seats do? No, the study said that would satisfy the area's needs until only about 1975, given the projected population growth. Instead, the study concluded, a 14,000-seat arena should be built.
"While it is difficult to determine how much `growing room' to provide, certainly the selected size should be adequate for 25 years," it said. A 14,000-seat arena "has been chosen as the appropriate seating to provide for 25 years' growth."
Considering the finished product, completed in 1969, seated less than 13,000 for basketball, and considering the metro population now exceeds 1 million, the county can argue it was lucky the arena lasted as long as it did.
Still, I have wondered whether the county could have found a use for a second arena, building the new convention center around it. In a 1992 news story about the planned demolition, I contacted every city in the National Basketball Association that had built a new arena and asked what governments planned to do with the old ones. Nearly all decided to keep the old arenas, some after fierce pressure and protests from residents.
An official in Phoenix made a strong argument about how some performers prefer midsize arenas to cavernous halls like the Delta Center. The owners of some basketball teams were toying with the idea of managing both the new and the old arenas, to take advantage of events that may be turned away if only one arena was in use.
But since that story, other old NBA arenas have been destroyed or soon will be. The list includes the Boston Garden, Chicago Stadium and San Antonio's HemisFair Arena. Not all of those were publicly owned. Still, using taxes to run an old arena probably isn't good public policy, especially if the county made it clear 31 years ago that it thought the arena would be obsolete by now.
In a few days, demolition crews will begin cutting the columns that support the main arena walls. The "drum" will tumble from the skyline. "The Missing Link" report was right. In a rapidly growing city, arenas and new convention centers are important. The Salt Palace arena helped make the Wasatch Front a major metropolitan area. It will be missed, but the time has come for it to go.
I just hope no one comes around in a few years whining about how we need another one.