Eccles wants bank building to stay

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Nov 3, 2006 by Doug Smeath Deseret Morning News

While The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rethinks its plans to tear down the historic First Security Bank building, the man who for years headed up that bank says he would like to see the building saved.

Spence Eccles, the former chief executive officer of First Security Corp., when asked Thursday whether he would like to see the building preserved, said simply, "Yes."

Eccles joins others, including several City Council members and the Utah Heritage Foundation, in voicing support for keeping the building standing instead of razing it to make way for a new office tower as part of the church's planned City Creek Center.

Advocacy by the Utah Heritage Foundation and other public comment led to the church's decision to re-evaluate its plans. But unlike the other voices calling for preservation, Eccles isn't actively pushing for it.

"We (at the Eccles Foundation) have no plans at all, because the decision has to be made, and (church officials) have said that they're reconsidering it. I read that in the newspaper," he said, suggesting he has not been involved in the church's discussion.

That includes the question of whether the foundation would help fund seismic and other renovations if the church decides not to demolish the building. He suggested, however, that such funding is a possibility.

"It's abundantly clear with anyone involved that we're a major preservation, conservation funder," he said. "We've funded many things downtown and across the state. I don't see that that wouldn't be certainly a consideration."

Church officials had little comment in response to Eccles' statements. In an e-mail Thursday to the Deseret Morning News, church spokesman Dale Bills said, "There are no new developments with the Deseret/First Security building."

Bills wrote that the re-evaluation of the plans continues and that Property Reserve Inc., the church's real-estate arm, will "at some future point...bring forward a plan for the corner where the building stands."

That corner -- the northeast corner of 100 South and Main Street - - has been home to a bank since Brigham Young opened the Deseret National Bank there in 1871. It later became First Security, which in 2000 merged with Wells Fargo.

Before PRI president Mark Gibbons announced on Oct. 19 that the church would study the possibility of saving the First Security building, church statements had said preservation would be too costly. Seismic retrofitting alone, they estimated, would cost "tens of millions of dollars," and it would still be unfit for office space because of low ceilings, structural support columns built too close together and a fragile terra cotta facade.

Kirk Huffaker of the Utah Heritage Foundation has suggested those problems could be overcome by converting the tower to a residential building or other use. But Gibbons, when he announced the reconsideration of the demolition, declined to specify what alternatives the church was considering.

Work on City Creek Center, a mixed-use development planned to replace the faltering Crossroads Plaza and ZCMI Center malls, is about to begin next week -- with or without a final decision on the First Security building. The Inn at Temple Square, which closed for good Sunday, is expected to come down Nov. 13, if all goes according to plan.

The Crossroads Plaza parking structure will come down next, followed by Crossroads itself, and then the Key Bank tower. Demolition on the ZCMI Center block, on which the First Security building is located, is slated to begin in about six months, although the First Security building likely wouldn't be the first to come down there.

E-mail: dsmeath@desnews.com