Work to begin in $90 million project in Cottonwood Heights
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An artist's rendering of The Canyon Center, which has been in development for approximately two years.
slideshow By Barbara Rattle
The Enterprise
Ground could be broken as soon as late this year for the Canyon Center, a $90 million commercial development on 11 acres at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon on a site that once housed the Canyon Racquet Club.
The property is owned by Canyon Center Capital LLC. It is managed by local CW Management Corp., of which Chris McCandless is president.
The Cottonwood Heights City Council, acting as the Community Development and Renewal Agency, last week approved several interlocal agreements with other taxing entities to create a Community Development Area for the Canyon Center.
Plans for the first phase of the development call for construction of a hotel, office building, two restaurant pad sites and a civic center with summer theater that would have the capacity for about 100 people, McCandless said, noting the project has been in the works for two years.
“We have a pretty good plan,” he said. “The good news is we have several hotel operators that want to buy in, which is really exciting. When no one is calling you and you’re doing a project, there’s a problem. Lots of people are calling. We have more restaurants than we have pad sites for that want to be involved in this project. We’ve selected the ones we think we want and we’re waiting for the monetization or the construction financing to become available, which we think we’ll have without too much trouble. We’re fairly confident the hotel will be 152 rooms, about 80,000 square feet. The first office building — there will eventually be three — will be a little bit north of the hotel, 80,000 square feet with 65,000 rentable and it’s already 100 percent leased. It will have a rooftop garden. We’ll be moving there. There’s a 15,000 square foot restaurant site. The operator we’ve been talking to has a gift shop/bookstore and brewery.”
McCandless said he envisions the civic center/amphitheater being home to the likes of farmers markets, small theatrical productions and small concerts. It will be surrounded by waterfalls, he said, and the entire project will be sprinkled with open-to-the-public plazas equipped with natural-gas powered firepits.
One of the project’s major benefits, along with three phases of networked trails, he said, is the addition of parking facilities for skiers.
“That has been the plague I think for Big Cottonwood Canyon for a long time. They park on surface streets, in subdivisions, every parking stall. The idea is to create kind of a gateway element into Big Cottonwood Canyon. We can welcome people to Big Cottonwood Canyon and Little Cottonwood Canyon in a pleasing manner instead of ‘really, is this it? It’s kind of beat up.’ The whole project looks like a resort center and that’s part of the deal. You’re at the mouth of the canyon, a UTA bus leaves from this site every 15 minutes for all four ski areas all day long. You can’t dream that stuff up. So we’ve got ski areas within 35 to 40 minutes of our front door using public mass transportation. That’s a phenomenal benefit, especially as the canyon transportation systems come under scrutiny. How many cars can we put up a canyon? This gives is a place to park cars for skiers and guests, hotel visitors, residents who just want to meet there, get on the bus and take the impact away from the canyon. It’s the first step. It’s not a cure-all to the canyon transportation problem, but it certainly will help.”
McCandless said site construction for a new roadway that will bisect the project site could begin in as few as four weeks. There is a tremendous amount of obsolete infrastructure that must be removed and replaced.
“We’re really hoping we can be under construction with the phase one parking structure, the office/hotel and first restaurant or two by the end of the year,” he said. “That’s a very aggressive timeline because there’s an awful lot of design work that needs to happen. We’ve been working with Layton Construction, a lot, and they’ve given us tremendous assistance in doing some estimating for some of the costs that are associated with this so we can see if it pencils financially, which it does very well. If we’re really doing well, we hope to see some vertical construction start by the end of the year.”
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