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SALT LAKE CITY — Main Street in downtown Salt Lake City will be open to motor traffic this Memorial Day weekend for the first time since 2020, all because the city's "Open Streets" program is on hold for the time being.
It's not that city leaders are moving on from the COVID-19 pandemic-era idea to turn the street into a temporary promenade as much as there's a regulatory hurdle in the way that is delaying it this year, as the city looks to find a more permanent solution for the road.
Andrew Wittenberg, a spokesman for the Salt Lake City Mayor's Office, explained that the city's Downtown Alliance was able to pull off the program through an emergency proclamation originally issued in 2020. But now that it has expired, the city has to alter some of its permit codes and coordinate "public safety measures" so that Main Street can be closed off to motor vehicles and vendors can extend outdoor seating, from North Temple to 400 South.
That includes changes in the rules tied to allowing bars and restaurants to have alcohol sales on sidewalks, among other things. City officials believe they will have everything cleared up by the end of the summer.
"(We're) hopeful to produce Open Streets once again ... later this year, in September and October," Wittenberg said.
The program initially began in September 2020 as a way for residents to continue to support Main Street businesses struggling because of COVID-19-related public health concerns. The city allowed bars and restaurants to extend seating out onto the sidewalk outside of their businesses and closed off the street to motor vehicle traffic so people could use the one lane for strolling and bike riding, during the weekends.
The Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance, a nonprofit that seeks to boost the downtown's economic well-being, could operate the program because of an emergency proclamation that the city issued during the pandemic. It returned in 2021 and 2022 as a summer spectacle of sorts, running on weekends from Memorial Day to Labor Day weekends, because the proclamation was still in place.
Wittenberg said the city's economic development department began a study earlier this month looking into options for a permanent "pedestrian-first Main Street promenade" with some — but limited — access for automobiles now that the declaration has expired. Part of the study would even look at the possibility of making it a year-round program.
"We're excited to study it and see what's possible," he said.
Downtown isn't dead
Recent studies appear to show that efforts to get people to downtown Salt Lake City, such as Open Streets, are working. The University of Toronto's ongoing review of North American downtown recoveries acknowledges that activity in Salt Lake City's downtown area this winter was 139% of pre-pandemic levels, the highest among the cities it reviewed.
While it's possible, if not likely, the NBA All-Star Game had something to do with that, the university's data show Salt Lake City's 2021 and 2022 summers were also in the top five of the cities it researched, with last summer's activity ending up 112% of 2019. The Downtown Alliance's internal data found that social economy visits to the downtown area also surpassed 2019 levels last summer even as office worker occupancy remains low.
In all, there were 16.6 million downtown visits in 2022. People who don't live or work downtown accounted for a little more than 60% of those visits.
"A lot of people think of downtown as a place for office workers. Office workers make up around 30% of the visits downtown in a year," Dee Brewer, executive director of the Downtown Alliance, told KSL.com on Thursday. "The large majority of people who use downtown are people who don't live or work downtown."
Finding other ways to 'activate' downtown
The Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance plans to help out with Open Streets again once the city has made all the necessary regulatory changes, Brewer said. The organization is also still planning on other ways to "activate" downtown Salt Lake City even without Open Streets for most of the summer, which is already underway.
The organization is aiding the city's Green Loop pop-up test park by holding events that get people to test out and potentially provide feedback on the project before it is removed in June. It's also helping the Salt Lake City Arts Council put on Busker Fest, where local street performers will perform on the Main Street and Regent sidewalks this Friday and Saturday.
There's "Steppin' on Main," too, an event highlighting the city's "diverse arts community," which will be held on the front steps and in the lobby of the Eccles Theater beginning June 16 with more events held at times through Labor Day weekend, says Britney Helmers, the program director of The Blocks, a section of the Downtown Alliance that centers on arts and entertainment programs.
Then there's the annual Twilight Concert Series, one of the larger events also happening downtown. The Downtown Alliance is also planning to tap into some of its All-Star Game experience to keep things lively, such as placing street performers on Utah Transit Authority TRAX trains as it did in February.
UTA officials told KSL.com earlier this month that transit riders will "see more" events on its modes of transportation in the future because of the positive feedback the idea received.
"NBA All-Star (Game weekend) was an opportunity to look at some experimental programming and we did that," said Jessica Thesing, deputy director of the Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance. "We were able to take some futuristic goals and align with programming to really pilot some great things downtown. ... Those types of events are definitely catalystic."
The ultimate goal with these efforts, Brewer explains, is to make downtown Salt Lake City a place where people want to go just so they can find something new to experience every time they visit.
All the events it is planning, including Open Streets, are a piece of the equation in making that happen.
"We want people to come downtown even if they don't have (an event) ticket in their hand," he said. "We want the capital city to be a destination and a gathering place for the Wasatch Front and the entire state."
