The rumor is into its third decade now, so durable - and in a way so predictable - that it even thrives outside Utah.
A couple of times a year, in fact, Salt Lake building services director Roger Evans gets a call from a developer in some distant city who is thinking about erecting an office building here. Is it true, the caller will ask, that no one in downtown Salt Lake City is allowed to build anything taller than the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?When the American Stores Center was finished earlier this year on the corner of 300 South and Main, the speculations started again. The skyscraper tops out at 400 feet - 20 feet shorter than the Church Office Building four blocks to the north. There must be a law, people began saying all over again. Or, at the very least, there must be a gentleman's agreement, one that keeps buildings shorter out of deference to the church.
Not true, says city planner Doug Dansie. He can't wait till somebody builds a taller building, just to put an end to the rumors.
Salt Lake's skyline has been dominated by the church's headquarters since 1975, when the building eclipsed the city's two tallest skyscrapers, the 270-foot Ken-necott Building and the 280-foot University Club Building, both on South Temple.
But economics and space requirements - not respect or intimidation - have kept buildings from going higher than the Church Office Building, say the developers of Salt Lake City's two most recent high rises.
"In those days, 24 floors was pretty scary," said Kem Gardner, president of the Boyer Co., developer of One Utah Center, which was completed in 1991. Boyer had a space commitment for 12 floors and then was able to get a loan for twice that amount. "If we were doing it today we would have added three or four or five more floors."
At the American Stores Center, "the driver was the number of associates we have and the space needed for them," said Dan Zvonek, the company's director of pub-lic relations.
Ironically, although the American Stores building isn't Salt Lake's tallest building, or even particularly tall as skyscrapers go, it is one of the tallest buildings erected in the United States in the past four years.
According to a group called the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, based in Bethlehem, Pa., only about a dozen buildings 20 stories or higher have been built in the United States since 1995. Only four of these were taller than the American Stores headquarters.
High-rise construction in the United States - the country that gave birth to the skyscraper - hit a low point from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s, said Lynn S. Beedle, director of the Council on Tall Buildings. With high vacancy rates and a downturned economy, businesses and developers weren't willing to take a risk on new skyscrapers. That trend is starting to reverse itself now, said Beedle.
But the really, really tall buildings these days are being built in Asia. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia - 1,483 feet high - nosed out Chicago's Sears Tower in 1996 as the world's tallest building. The Petronas Towers will in turn be overtaken by Shanghai's World Financial Center - 1,509 feet high - in 2001.
Compared to the world's big cities and the world's big players, Utah's skyline seems to have been built with a few leftover Legos. Even the smaller big cities have a great many more skyscrapers. While Denver has at least 25 buildings over 20 stories tall and Seattle about 50, according to the Council on Tall Buildings, Salt Lake City has only six.
The smaller number of tall buildings, the space between them and the unusual width of our streets all result in a downtown that lacks a certain "urban intensity," said Bill Miller, dean of the Uni-versity of Utah's school or architecture. For a city our size, he said, we are still surprisingly horizontal.
But Salt Lake's skyline is noticeably more vertical than it was two decades ago - with the addition of not just American Stores, One Utah Center and Eagle Gate plaza, but a couple of handfuls of buildings in the 15-story range.
These midsize buildings, plus more downtown buildings in general, add volume to the city, notes Miller. In the four years between now and the Olympics, he said, it's this "scaling up of the height of downtown" that people will notice most.
Salt Lake's skyline was dominated in the early years, of course, by church structures: first the Tabernacle, completed in 1867, and then the LDS Temple, finished in 1893.
But while Utahns were busy hauling granite and building spires, engineers in other parts of the country were figuring out how to make buildings out of steel columns and beams, thus eliminating the need for massive foundations and thick walls on the bottom floors to hold the whole thing up. By then, Elisha Otis had already invented a safe, reliable elevator. The next step was to build what came to be known as the skyscraper.
There is some debate over the location of the first real skyscraper. Some say it was the Chicago branch of the New York Home Insurance Co., built in 1884.
Utah's first skyscrapers were the 11-story Boston and Newhouse buildings, built on the east side of Main Street between 300 South and 400 South in 1909.
But the era's most famous building was the Walker Bank Building: at 19 stories (16 full stories plus three smaller ones above that) not only Salt Lake's tallest but the tallest building between the Missouri River and the West Coast.
No skyscrapers were built in Utah in the 1930s and 1940s - who could afford to? - so the Salt Lake skyline does not have the luxury of a great variety of skyscraper styles.
The city's skyline didn't add anything else very dramatic until 1955, when the First Security Bank Building went up on the corner of 400 South and Main. Where the Walker Building and its contemporaries looked both solid and whimsical (with the occasional roaring lion on its cornices), First Security was brick and glass - and kind of boring in a 1950s kind of way. Still, it did have the city's first elevators that didn't require an attendant.
Most of Salt Lake's skyscrapers since 1955 have been state-of-the-art but not anything particularly cutting-edge or "stellar," said architecture professor Miller. Because we don't yet have many high-rises, "we don't have competition yet to build interesting ones," as a city such as Denver does.
The American Stores Center's blue neon is the closest thing we have to cutting-edge, said Miller.
But of course we have something else going for us. In most cities, to get a great view, you have to ride to the top of a very tall building. In Salt Lake City we can climb to the top of Ensign Peak or Red Butte or any old street above Foothill Drive and can see the whole city laid out before us.
Or we can stand on any sidewalk downtown and see the skyline we're really famous for - the mountains themselves.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Expect the city's skyline to keep soaring
- The sky's the limit, sort of:
Technically, there are no height limitations to buildings in Salt Lake's downtown core (roughly North Temple to 600 South, 200 East to 200 West). Although zoning laws limit building heights to 375 feet on downtown corners (100 feet mid-block), developers can apply for a conditional use.
The city's Planning Commission then looks at airport flight paths and visual aesthetics for the proposed building. A 100-story high-rise, for example, would look out of place compared with current buildings and would be rejected, said city planner Doug Dansie. At least until the city has a few 40-story skyscrapers and then a couple of 60-story ones . . . .
The Planning Commission also looks for designs that don't look like "cereal boxes," said Dansie. It wants "some sort of roof-line treatment that adds something to the skyline."
- Stories don't tell the whole story when it comes to high-rises.
In a residential building such as a hotel or an apartment house, the stories are typically 10 feet high; modern office buildings usually have 12 to 16 feet between each floor.
The Empire State Building has 102 stories, while the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpar has only 88 - but Petronas is currently the world's tallest building and the Empire State Building has slipped to No. 8.
- Who has the best view?
The top floors of Salt Lake's tallest skyscrapers are mostly populated by lawyers and bigwigs. Here's who's on the very top:
The American Stores Center: American Stores executives.
One Utah Center: Utah Power, Stoel Rives law firm.
Eagle Gate: Cannon Industries and MK Gold.
136 E. South Temple (formerly University Club): Engineering Animation
Beneficial Life: Beneficial Life, Intermountain Health Care, lawyer Richard Carling.
Unless you have business with any of these people, you only have access to the view from the LDS Church Office Building, which has a free observation deck on the 26th floor.