Seeing Straight

One of the primary goals of Salt Lake County, Salt Lake City and the SEG (Smith Entertainment. Group) is to create a better pedestrian connection from West Temple to the Delta Center. Right now there is an overbuilt convention center in the way. The SEG plan calls for building a new street that plows a straight line from the new front entrance of the Delta Center through two blocks to the front door of Nordstrom. For some unknown reason the County planners and Ryan Smith are dead set against any kind of curve or deviation in this new street which would accommodate Abravanel Hall.

The red line represents a new pedestrian connection through the existing (and overbuilt) convention center. Drawings show it as a private pedestrian zone up to 180 feet wide and more than 1800 feet long (9 football fields). If you stand at one end, you will see the other end as a tiny dot. Stand and look from 2nd to 4th or any two Salt Lake City big blocks. You’ll get a good idea of the scale of this proposal. The streets of Salt Lake are 132 feet wide.

I will go out on a limb here and say to you that this is just bad urban planning. Trying to create a linear path that’s two blocks-plus long, and has some kind of cohesiveness goes against all of the principles of pedestrian liveliness. These principles are clear. The space needs to be comfortably scaled, not for a tank, but for people. It needs to feel like an attractive space, even if it is occupied by only a few clumps of people.

If you stand on any street corner in downtown and you look two blocks in any direction you will see that you can’t really see anything beyond the next block. The scale is too uncomfortable to draw pedestrians.

A good pedestrian space is one that is scaled so that the pedestrian feels comfortable. A wide, two block long open space that is lined with very tall buildings and their parking podium is not a comfortable space. One need only to look at Red Square (Moscow) or Tiananmen Square or even St Peter’s to understand that these wide spaces are meant to represent power.

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