City Creek Center: a roof that opens and doors that close on Sunday

The ribbon came down on a Thursday. City Creek Center opened on March 22, 2012, across three downtown blocks directly south of Temple Square, with roughly 90 storefronts, two anchors (a 125,000-square-foot Nordstrom and a 155,000-square-foot Macy's), a food court seating 1,000, and more than 5,000 underground parking spaces. The project had been announced on October 3, 2006, and demolition began that November, so the mall arrived a little over five years later, in the middle of a recession that the Deseret News, which the Church owns, noted had lowered construction costs. Pieces had opened early: the food court on June 10, 2009, a Deseret Book flagship on March 25, 2010, and a Harmons grocery in February 2012.

The price tag is the first number people ask about, and the record is not tidy. Wikipedia gives an estimated total of $1.5 to $2 billion. The Salt Lake Tribune used $2 billion in its opening coverage. The Deseret News used both $1.5 billion and $2 billion in the same week. Taubman Centers, the Michigan mall operator that took a long-term lease on the retail, put in $76 million of its own money. Whatever the true figure, the mall was the centerpiece of a downtown rebuild the press totalled at close to $5 billion (2012), and the shops took in $200 million in their first nine months.

Size is reported two ways as well. The Tribune's pre-opening guide counted 700,000 square feet of retail on 23 acres; Wikipedia lists 890,000 square feet of gross leasable area. Both agree on the 23 acres, the 1,200-foot recreated creek, and the roughly 700 condominiums and apartments above the shops, listed at opening from $200,000 to more than $2 million to buy and $1,200 to $1,900 a month to rent.

Two entities developed the project: City Creek Reserve, Inc. and Property Reserve, Inc., both commercial real-estate arms of the Church. Taubman Centers ran the retail under a long-term lease from opening day, and its general manager, Linda Wardell, told the Tribune that the rules would mirror the company's 24 other malls. Wikipedia now lists Simon Property Group as an owner alongside the two Church companies, with a Simon affiliate managing the property. On the money, the Church's position has not moved since 2012: no tithing was spent on the mall, which was financed through Property Reserve, and the Deseret News reported that the Church paid in cash. Keith McMullin, who ran Deseret Management Corporation, the Church's for-profit holding company, put the expected financial return this way to the Tribune in October 2012: "Will there be a return? Yes, but so modest that you would never have made such an investment." The Church's stated reason was not yield. It wanted control over the blocks that surround Temple Square, and a quiet Sunday next to its most visited site. That is why the tax question is less interesting than it sounds: Deseret Management Corporation is a for-profit company and pays taxes like one, while the Church's donated funds are tax-exempt. The mall sits on the commercial side of that line.

Then there are the rules, which is where the mall stops looking like every other Taubman property. Stores close on Sundays. The walkways stay open from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., and at opening only The Cheesecake Factory and Texas de Brazil traded on Sunday. No storefront sells alcohol. Restaurants may hold full liquor licences, but in 2012 they had to hide the bottles behind the frosted partitions Utahns call Zion curtains, and only two restaurants poured at all on opening day; Blue Lemon was alcohol-free by choice and Sixth and Pine, inside Nordstrom, was alcohol-free by the terms of its lease. The conduct code bans shirtless or shoeless visitors, clothing management finds offensive, running, swearing, skateboarding, smoking, panhandling, proselytizing, petition-gathering and photography without prior consent. Girl Scouts cannot sell cookies. Wardell said 90 percent of incidents ended in a conversation rather than an ejection, and of the roof she said it was "sort of like owning a convertible."

"No other U.S. shopping center has retractable roofs." Linda Wardell, City Creek general manager, March 2012

The complaints came in three kinds and arrived at different times. The first was about the street. Merchants worried that the skybridge would pull foot traffic off Main Street, and they had a precedent: the ZCMI Center and Crossroads Plaza malls of the 1970s and 1980s were followed by the closure of Auerbach's and The Paris Company. The Salt Lake Tribune ran an editorial asking whether the mall could meet the expectations placed on it, and Stephen Clark of the ACLU of Utah said the photography rules and the vague conduct standards would produce "imprecise judgment calls." A barber three blocks away, Perry Knuth, told the Deseret News he assumed the Church's aim was to bring more people downtown to build up the kingdom of God.

The second was about whether a church should be in the luxury-retail business at all. Critics argued the money would have done more as welfare or humanitarian spending. The Church's reply, repeated in 2012, was that the project protected the surroundings of Temple Square, that no tithing was involved, and that Sunday closure was for "the day of peace" near the temple.

The third came seven years later and was the serious one. In 2019 a former portfolio manager at Ensign Peak Advisors, the Church's investment arm, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that $1.4 billion had been moved from funds set aside for charitable purposes into the mall during the 2008 financial crisis. The claim went to court. In January 2025 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously that the Church had not misrepresented the source of the money and that no funds intended for charity were used; the project was paid for out of earnings on invested reserves, as Church leaders had said. Between those two dates the mall closed for the pandemic from March 12 to May 6, 2020, and had windows smashed in the George Floyd protests that spring, when the National Guard was posted outside.

City Creek is the clearest example in Utah of a business decision made for a religious reason and then defended in commercial terms. Sunday closure costs a mall one trading day in seven. Taubman accepted it because the landlord insisted; in 2012 it was the only one of the company's 25 properties with the policy. The same trade shows up elsewhere in the profiles on this site. Larry H. Miller, who bought half the Utah Jazz for $8 million in 1985 and the rest in 1986, attended nearly every home game for two decades except the ones played on Sunday. Sheri Dew had run Deseret Book, another Church-owned company, since March 2002 when the chain opened its flagship store inside the unfinished mall on March 25, 2010, two years before the rest of it.

The alcohol rules are the other lesson, and they are less absolute than outsiders expect. J. Willard Marriott, planning his first hotel in a state that allowed liquor sales, the Philadelphia City Line property of the 1960s, asked Church president David O. McKay what to do. McKay's counsel, as the family tells it, was that if liquor was an essential part of what hotels offer, the Marriotts were obliged to sell it, though not in the family-oriented Hot Shoppes. City Creek lands in the same place: restaurants may pour, storefronts may not. Even the Zion curtains had a business afterlife. Jon Huntsman Jr., as governor, signed a 2009 law letting existing restaurants take them down, and a 2017 bill replaced the requirement with a ten-foot buffer between the bar and tables seating minors. If you lease space here, you are dealing with a landlord that has said in public why the rules exist. That is rarer than it should be.