Trapped inside Salt Lake's newest skyscraper, a sparrow fluttered against a window the other day in a fruitless attempt to get out.
The building is temporary shelter to numerous winged creatures, roosting in the rafters since construction that started in August 1995 began closing in on them. Their days inside are numbered, however.
In the next few weeks, the birds will be banished - under the coercion of construction workers - and by late January, the edifice will start filling up with the 1,850 company employees who will take up quarters in the 620,000-square-foot American Stores Center, administration central for the second-biggest chain of grocery and drug stores in the United States.
The move-in starts Jan. 19 and will take several months as personnel from eight American Stores offices scattered around Salt Lake finally come together. The change is a concrete manifestation of the corporation's modern efforts to streamline the company. Until founder and former CEO Sam Skaggs stepped down from his post and sold off his sizable stake in the company, a struggle was waged inside American Stores over how to run the sprawling enterprise and its chains of more than 700 retail outlets.
CEO Victor L. Lund, who took over from Skaggs, has long pushed for more centralized management of American Stores, which under Skaggs ran its assorted entities - including the Osco Drug chain, the Lucky Stores grocery chain in California and Alpha Beta stores in numerous states - as separate entities.
It all comes together now under one lofty roof, which takes up a good part of a city block between State and Main streets and along 300 South.
"I love seeing guys pushing brooms - it means we're almost done," said Pete Bratsos, American Stores' vice president of design and engineering, as he led a tour past a crew sweeping up sawdust.
"We have not said what it cost" to construct the building, said company spokesman Dan Zvonek, but outside estimates have put it at around $100 million, a price tag that affords swank amenities. The American Stores Center is no crackerbox crammed full of cramped cubicles.
The company, in fact, has placed an aesthetic stamp on the center, and it shows.
Limestone for some touches came from Indiana. Certain floor segments are finished with English slate, and granite from Minnesota was trucked in for other features. A sky bridge - which required a special zoning dispensation from the city - spans a back street between the building and its 1,457-space parking garage with a glass-block floor accentuated by cold-cathode lighting, the latest in post-neon illumination. The building's 10 passenger elevators - augmented by seven freight and service elevators - are trimmed with African mahogany.
An 11,000-square-foot fitness center will sport six treadmills and assorted other workout machines. A pair of "helipads" atop the building are there purportedly for emergency use only but look suspiciously like a quick alternative for top executives looking to beat traffic jams.
The structure is also supposed to withstand tremors. Special "dog-bone" joists would cause the building to sway rather than collapse during all but the most severe earthquakes, and it is rooted to 12 piles driven 70 feet into the ground below. With its elevator overrun topping out at 400 feet above street level - 25 stories up - the tower remains one story shorter than Salt Lake's tallest structure, the high-rise headquarters for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a few blocks north.
This, insists Zvonek, is purely coincidental and suggests no architectural deference for the city's predominant social, cultural and - arguably - business influence.
"We just built it to suit our needs," he said.
These include a work environment that isn't exactly gritty. A sound system will pipe in "pink noise," a background buzz that's alleged to be a generation evolved beyond widely used white noise. Ten-foot-high ceilings allow for plenty of natural light and "theater seating," which slopes cubicle partitions from one side of the building's broad office floors to the other, guaranteeing even the lowliest bean counter an unobstructed view to the east of the Wasatch Range.
Tall atriums on the west side of every floor of the building are meant to spawn a communal atmosphere where people can eat lunch and take coffee breaks.
"We wanted to create and maintain gathering spaces in order to avoid the high-rise mentality," Zvonek explained.
Employees need not leave the building during the workday. "The American Store" will take up 17,000 square feet in the basement, offering a complete grocery-shopping and cafeteria experience and giving Utahns their first local look at the company's retailing. Although American Stores is a huge player on the national scene, it operates no retail operations in Utah, having closed its last Alpha Beta store here a few years ago.
A second-floor Italian eatery - Il Sansovino - is the fancy restaurant on the premises. It will undoubtedly attract patrons from outside the building, as will numerous other first- and second-floor businesses, including a Murdock Travel office, a branch of American First Federal Credit Union, First Security Bank and others.
The block for years has languished in a post-suburban daze as former downtown institutions such as J.C. Penney and Woolworth's succumbed to demographic change that has seen consumers shift their shopping to distant strip malls.
"This is going to be good for all the downtown businesses," Zvo-nick promised, noting that the area was officially declared blighted under a redevelopment edict that gave American Stores certain tax incentives to build there.
"Before," Zvonek said, "there was very little going on here."