The First Decade — Second in a series: A new millennium was born amid concerns about the Y2K bug. Far more real fears unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001. Deseret News and Associated Press writers today continue a series of essays examining the major developments of the past decade and their impact on Utah and beyond.
First they changed the name but kept the sign. Later they took down the sign and knocked over the building. Then they dug up the entire mall, name and all. And so, as the first decade of the third millennium came to an end, ZCMI was no longer a store or a mall or an icon, it was a relic.
Down with the old and up with New Urban, with its mantras of mixed-use and walkable. Build a super mall in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City, landscape the place with native plants, change the name to City Creek Center. ZCMI had been a fixture of Utah life since the early days of Deseret, but this was the dawn of the 21st century and everything was being turned upside down.
The decade saw the razing and then rising of two historically pivotal blocks of Utah real estate. That makes Utah's capital city an anomaly: Its downtown, despite the downturn, is filled with construction workers and cranes. Meanwhile, the decade also saw downtown veering west, to Gateway and beyond, to neighborhoods where restaurants once feared to tread.
"The world is welcome here," Utah's motto gushed in 2002, and years after the party was over the world has continued to show up at our door. Utah, long considered a geographic "crossroads of the West," was, post-Olympics, not just a place where interstates converged but more clearly a destination. And the pull of Utah has lasted through the worst recession in decades, as the jobless in Michigan and Ohio packed up their U-Hauls and headed west.
With all those people moving in — over 200,000 "net in-migrants" since 2000 — plus our record-setting number of births nearly every year this decade, Utah added more than a half million people, a growth rate nearly three times bigger than the nation's.
And one-third of those arrivals, whether they came by car or birth canal, were Hispanics and other "minorities," a term that became increasingly meaningless during the decade, as Salt Lake and Ogden school districts became "minority majority." One out of every four preschool-age children in the state is now a minority; one out of every three in Salt Lake County.
To the mix of Hispanics and Pacific Islanders came refuges from Somalia, Iraq, Burma, Nepal. When Utah schoolchildren were asked to list the number of languages spoken at home, the total rose to 117.
We're still the most isolated metro area in the nation, but our metropolis now stretches from Logan to Payson and is one of the country's most urban. And that comes with a price: we emit more carbon per capita than Phoenix. The Wasatch Front is also now paralleled by a burgeoning Wasatch Back; Heber is the fastest growing "micropolitan" area in the U.S.
We're a state with both sprawl and vision, and in the first decade of this century we saw both. We saw Herriman and Eagle Mountain explode with stucco houses as far as the eye can see, and we saw the dawning of Daybreak, a suburban planned community whose population density is greater than downtown Salt Lake City's.
We saw monster homes and people finally saying "enough!" We felt validated when chains like IKEA, Cabela's and The Cheesecake Factory picked us, but that also meant we could drive through any intersection from South Jordan to Layton and increasingly feel we'd been some place like it before.
Still, we kept trying to get it right, recognizing that mixed-use and walkable really are necessary if we want our metropolis to work. And that brings us to a different ZCMI, this time at the Cottonwood Mall in Holladay.
The mall is a fitting place to witness the ups and downs of the decade: ZCMI became Meier & Frank's, then Macy's, and then the mall it anchored was bulldozed, as the aptly named General Growth Properties unveiled its exuberant plans to turn the land into a "European village" full of town homes and shops. And then the bubble burst and the company filed for bankruptcy.
Now, next to the Macy's, there's just an empty field, waiting for the next decade to bring more change better news.
e-mail: jarvik@desnews.com