Something about long skybridges irks me. They cut off natural paths of traffic from each other, they're kinda ugly, and IMO they absolutely kill the street engagement of any area. Look at city creek. It should have an incredibly high amount of pedestrian traffic but instead of aligning the mall with the end of the trax stop they just put a bridge over the top of it and sucked main street dry of any attitude except for H&M, West Elm, and cotopaxi.
Skybridges are a very Las Vegas-esque solution to something that doesn't need to be solved. Make the sidewalks wide, line them with trees and shops, and let them walk to the convention center. You should not be able to spend the entire day inside of a convention center and hotel. People certainly have the right to be isolated from the climate for the vast majority of the time, but we live in one of the most naturally beautiful cities in the U.S. We don't live in minneapolis, our eyes aren't going to freeze shut. The most ideal solution is to strangle the cars of the vast spaces of land they eat up and accommodate high volume pedestrian movements through 100S / West Temple.
I think this goes to show how much I hate developments that keep pedestrians inside and locked up in general. Japantown is dead. That entire area is hot, grey, and dirty. The salt palace killed that area of town. And now we have an street that is uninterrupted for 1300 feet. That's unheard of in any city in the US to have a block interrupted for such a long length due simply to a building.
I spent some time in Queen Anne, Seattle these last couple of weeks and I know that seattle is an icon of dense, right-sized urban development but it still strikes me how developers are choosing to design their megaprojects. There are so many glaring differences that seem subtle but add up to big issues. They're undervegetating properties and when they are, they're using trees that stay dead for most of the year despite the large amount of evergreen trees endemic to SLC. They're constructing wide, uninterrupted swaths of... building. It doesn't even matter, but so many recent developments have gone up that are dry of personality. They look soviet. Even the choices of materials are bad.
Those windows that you see on every single apartment building in SLC, surrounded with stucco? Those are cheap windows and yes, people notice that they're ugly.
The salt palace is no different. Its isolated, its dry, its
hideous, and it contributes so much to the urban blight in and around W. Temple and 200 W that its almost depressing.
I guess I'm getting off topic, but I really, really, really hate the Salt Palace. Its way too flat and it cuts off each side of 100S to the point that the 130 foot wide western portion of 100S has essentially become a "dead" street. That's depressing. Japantown got knocked down for the salt palace.
If I had it my way, I would knock down the salt palace and put it on the 300W/S Temple empty parking lot. Stretch it vertically, and leave midblock pathways. And I would redevelop the entire area, but I wouldn't hand it off to one single developer like the Cowboy brothers or whatever the hell they're called. I want to see stuff
like this in downtown SLC. Its not tall, its not boisterous, but its connected to the cityscape, its beautiful, and its at a human scale. I don't understand why we don't see stuff like this in SLC. The economics are here. I just don't think that SLC's planning commissions and local laws are strong enough at stipulating that projects are aesthetically pleasing, VEGETATED (why is this so much of a fucking issue? why are our streets barren of trees? please plant some FUCKING TREES), and human-scaled.
I am writhing at Joseph Smith right now. Fuck your oxcarts.
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And the walkway from that block to city creek. 
Makes too much sense so it probably wont happen. 
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