Opinion: Here’s what I (and other Daybreak residents) would like to see in Downtown Daybreak

By Justin Adams

A little less than one year from now, the Salt Lake Bees will make their 2025 season debut in a brand new stadium located here in Daybreak. The new stadium, announced in January 2023, will be the focal point of a new urban center known as Downtown Daybreak. But what else will be in this new downtown area?

What We Already Know

We know a few details of what will be included in Downtown Daybreak. In a video on downtowndaybreak.com, Larry H. Miller Real Estate President Brad Holmes lists a few things that we can expect.

“Downtown Daybreak will take years to complete. We’re starting with the entertainment district, a mix of offices and places to live, with great restaurants, a performance venue, a Megaplex Cinema Entertainment Center, and a minor league ballpark,” says Holmes.

The website goes into a little more detail as to what will be included in phase one of the project. That includes:

• 75,000 square feet of retail/food & beverage
• 300+ residential units
• Outdoor amphitheater stage
• Salt Lake Bees ballpark
• Parks and outdoor gathering places
• Cinema Entertainment Center, which includes bowling lanes and an arcade
• Outdoor ice-skating rink
• 100,000+ square feet of office

That’s about all we know for now. But hey, let’s speculate a little bit. After all, half the fun of the Christmas season is wondering about what might be in those presents under the tree. I have some ideas for what I personally would like to see included in Downtown Daybreak. I also went to the Daybreak Resident group on Facebook to ask what you’d like.

Food and Beverage

Any decent sports and entertainment district has to have some great food offerings. A wide variety of restaurants and bars catering to the different tastes and wallet sizes of those who want to grab some food or drink before they head to the ballpark. This was far and away the most popular response on my post in the Daybreak Residents group.

The general consensus seemed to be that Daybreak residents want more fine dining options as well as some cozy little cafes where one can grab a quick bite or a coffee. They also would like to see locally-owned restaurants, rather than national chains.

Here is a small sample of some of the responses:

“An upscale wine or whiskey bar.” - Eric Rasmussen

“A really good steakhouse.” - Casey Ainsworth

“A brewery/bar and an Italian restaurant.” - Terra Spencer

“David kitchen, Loco Lizard, BBQ place and Leatherby’s.” - Lee Weech

“An Italian bakery. With homemade breads, bagels, specialty coffee, salami, meats, cheese and amazing cakes.” - Danielle Ball

As for me personally, I’m a sucker for some good breakfast food. So I would love to see something like a Penny Anne’s or a Sunday’s Best in Downtown Daybreak. The other thing on my personal wish list is a Bruxie. They have this amazing fried chicken sandwich where the buns are replaced with waffles. I’ve only had it once years ago but I’ve been craving it ever since. Only problem for me is most of their locations are in California.

I certainly don’t claim to have any insights into what kinds of bars or restaurants Larry H. Miller Real Estate is interested in bringing in. But I look at what kinds of businesses have recently opened in the North Shore area, and they suggest to me that LHM does care about having locally-owned and/or unique restaurants in Daybreak. MOZZ Pizza, for example, is locally owned and has only two other locations in Salt Lake City and Provo. And Beard Papa’s, while technically a national chain, only has 1 or 2 locations in most states. So based on that evidence, I’d be pretty surprised if Downtown Daybreak ends up being full of big brand chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and Starbucks.

Performance Venues

This category follows quite naturally from the food and beverage category, as noted by this Daybreak resident.

“Smaller venues for live entertainment. Live music could pair really well with the bar/restaurant ideas mentioned. Venues for live dance, theater, and larger ensembles would be amazing, too.” - Jake Hendriksen

We already know that Downtown Daybreak will include an outdoor amphitheater, but the thing about Utah is that outdoor amenities really only work for half the year. So I, like many other Daybreak residents, think it would be great to have more indoor venues.

Just last week, I went to the monthly LiveDaybreak Open Mic Night, which was held at Biscotts Bakery and Cafe. Now I love Biscotts and it was a great event but the only problem is that there wasn’t enough space. It was basically “standing room only” when I arrived. So there’s clearly an appetite for these kinds of public performance space.

I think it would be great to have a bar with a large, open room with a permanent stage that could host everything from small jazz bands to stand-up comedy shows to magic shows. It could even have moveable seats and tables so on some nights they could be cleared away to make room for a dance floor.

Retail, Activities, and Experiences

We’ve talked about the food and beverage side of things. What about retail? That’s kind of a tricky one. I’m no expert on the subject of commercial real estate, but it doesn’t take an expert to know that brick-and-mortar retail is a risky investment in today’s world of online shopping.

If this Downtown Daybreak project was happening fifteen or twenty years ago, we maybe could have expected to get a full department store as a retail anchor, plus a dozen other popular clothing stores. But those days are over. Department stores are closing left and right. High-end brands are focused on store locations in places like Fashion Place and City Creek. You’d think that would leave more opportunity for small, locally-owned boutiques, but that doesn’t seem to be the case either. The only places that seem to be surviving are “budget friendly” stores like Ross and TJ Maxx. And whatever demand for mid-budget clothes stores that exists in this corner of the valley might have already been met by Mountain View Village, which has an Anthropologie, Lululemon, Cotton On, böhme, and Brandy Melville, to name a few.

So, what kinds of tenants will fill Downtown Daybreak’s retail spaces? What I’d like to see (and what the national trend has been for a while) is experience-based businesses. Think escape rooms and axe throwing, things like that. Those particular examples might have already reached their peak popularity though. If Downtown Daybreak is going to be a regional destination, it will need something that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the region.

I’ve heard great things about Omega Mart in Las Vegas. It’s an interactive art installation fashioned to look like a regular old grocery store, but visitors quickly find that there’s much more to it as they uncover hidden doors and passageways leading to secret rooms that make you feel like you’ve walked into another dimension. How cool would it be for Downtown Daybreak to be the home of something like that?

Or how about something that leverages all of the recent advancements in technology fields like virtual reality and artificial intelligence to create an engaging customer experience. For example, I’ve heard of clothing boutiques that don’t have any products for people to actually purchase on-site, but instead have a series of mirrors and augmented reality screens that allow visitors to virtually “try on” hundreds of different outfits in minutes and then add whatever they like to their virtual shopping cart. I imagine there are several other innovative companies working on creative applications for these new technologies that could become a “first-to-market” attraction.

And while it wouldn’t be the first of its kind in our market, I think some kind of children’s museum could do really well in Downtown Daybreak.

“I feel like there’s really no good indoor kids options in the winter. Something like the treehouse museum or a smaller version of Thanksgiving Point. We have the Gale Center… but we need something newer and more modern for kids to do things in the winter.” - Tiana Pack

I’ve been to the children’s museum at Thanksgiving Point a few times recently, and it’s been very crowded, especially on the weekends. So it’d make sense to have another attraction in this part of the valley where most of the new home construction and young families are located. Perhaps it could be a sports-themed children’s museum, both to tie it in to the ballpark and to differentiate it from its competitors.

Walkability and Transportation

Many of the responses to my post on Facebook mentioned the importance of walkability.

“Street engagement must go hand-in-hand with walkability. Small businesses including bakeries, cafes, boutiques, services such as dry cleaning or neighborhood pharmacies…” - Walt Parker

“Lots of restaurants and cafés so you can stroll down the street and walk past outdoor seating as if you were in a French town.” - Marc Poussard

“A walkable area of restaurants and shops without any traffic to worry about. An area playing music where people can just relax, eat and drink outside during summer evenings.” - Dave Mugleston

I whole-heartedly agree with these sentiments. One of my favorite things about Daybreak is its walkability, so it’s only fitting that its downtown urban core be the most walkable of all. Ideally, that wouldn’t just mean pedestrian-friendly, but pedestrian-only. A street that is completely closed off to vehicular traffic for at least a block or two. This is something Salt Lake City has experimented with on Main Street in recent years, and the results for businesses have been so positive, they’re considering making it a permanent change.

The Downtown Daybreak website doesn’t say anything specifically about a pedestrian-only area (at least as far as I can find) but the site map does have this interesting section highlighted in orange that stretches from the ballpark stadium to the County Library. There’s no designation for what this orange section is, but it seems like it would be a great candidate for being a pedestrian-only zone. Or at least one that limits traffic to emergency response vehicles and delivery trucks or something like that.

Now as much as I would love for Downtown Daybreak to be a place where Daybreak residents access via walking or biking, and folks from outside access via public transportation, I don’t think that’s realistic. While the TRAX Red Line will run right through Downtown Daybreak, that’s not really going to be a sensible option for a lot of people. Consider someone coming from Utah County. Any TRAX station further along the Red Line where someone might “park and ride” is further north than Daybreak, so that person would essentially be driving past their final destination, only to backtrack on public transportation. No one’s going to do that. And since there are no east-west public transportation options across the valley, anyone that lives in the Sandy/Draper area is going to drive.

So it seems that there is inevitably going to be a good amount of vehicle traffic coming into Downtown Daybreak. The question is then, what’s the best way to accommodate that traffic? The worst option, in my opinion, would be to have multiple surface level parking lots strewn around the area. I would much rather have one 4-5 story parking garage. That may sound unpopular to some, since parking garages can be quite an eyesore. But if done right, they can be not just an effective solution for the problem of parking, but an attraction in and of themselves.

There could be a rooftop concert series, like the one in Provo. Or you could have one of the parking garage facades be a giant canvas for an artist's alley full of beautiful murals. Or perhaps there could be an arrangement with a local company to operate a rooftop pickleball league on evenings where there isn’t a ballgame or concert to fill up the parking stalls.

Conclusion

Every morning and every evening, I take my dog Charlie for a walk around Highland Park. From there, I have a great vantage point of the area that will become Downtown Daybreak - it’s easy to spot because of the two large cranes that have been installed there to work on the stadium. Every time I see them, I get excited thinking about the possibilities of this new urban core so close to my home. I think about the fact that I’ll be able to take my family for a short walk or an even shorter bike ride across Mountain View Corridor and into Downtown Daybreak where we can enjoy a Salt Lake Bees game, an outdoor concert, or a movie. I can’t wait to watch this space take shape over the coming years, and I’ll certainly do my best to document its progress.

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