The towers that never got their steel above the ground

Khashoggi's steel arrived and then sat unused

Essam Khashoggi broke ground on the Triad Center on June 1, 1982. He was chairman of Triad America. The plan was enormous. Ten years of construction. Twenty-six acres of downtown Salt Lake City.

The project would include two 40-story office towers. Three 25-story residential towers. A hotel. A farmers' market. An ice rink. A park. All of it wrapped around the old Devereaux House a short walk from where you stand.

The first piece went up fast. A broadcast house for KSL radio and television opened on July 12, 1984. That was just two years after Khashoggi's shovel hit the dirt. A ten-story office building followed close behind. For a moment, the whole vision looked like it might actually rise.

Then it stalled. Ground broke for the real prize on June 7, 1985. It was a 35-story tower called 1 Triad Center. Crews dug the basement. Steel for the skyscraper arrived at the site. Then the money ran out. Construction stopped. The steel sat there, unused.

Within a year, Triad America canceled the rest of the project. The twin towers, the residential blocks, the ice rink and amphitheater never left the drawing board. What Khashoggi's decade-long plan left behind was three pieces: the broadcast house, the office building, and a parking structure. Had the tower gone up, it would have been Utah's tallest building. Instead the site sat unfinished for years. Its scaled-back buildings stood alone on ground cleared for something much bigger.

A flagship church university closed after one year

The finished piece of the Triad Center still sits on ground that had already swallowed one grand plan. Brigham Young left money to build three church academies before he died in 1877. Two went up without trouble, in Provo and Logan. The Salt Lake school stalled for years over his estate and absent trustees.

It finally opened in 1893 as the Church University (Salt Lake City). It was meant to be the flagship school of the entire church education system. It shared its downtown building with the church's Deseret Museum. Within a single year, it closed. Church leaders decided to put their weight behind a school in Provo instead, the one that eventually grew into Brigham Young University. The building did not sit empty. It passed to the University of Utah, then to West High School, then became the longtime home of Horace Mann Junior High.

A mob lynched a Black army veteran nearby

At the corner of State Street and 100 South, a crowd lynched a Black US Army veteran named William Harvey. He had been accused of killing Salt Lake City's police chief, Andrew H. Burt. No trial reached a verdict. The mob decided the case before a court could.

Salt Lake City carried more than one story like this. Fourteen years earlier, a formerly enslaved man named Thomas Coleman was beaten and killed in the city, his death never resolved by prosecution either.

A finished mansion outlasted the towers meant to ring it

Long before Khashoggi's steel arrived, the ground near the Triad Center held a much older, finished building. William Staines built the Devereaux House in 1857. William Jennings expanded it decades later. He was later mayor of Salt Lake City. He turned it into a social center. It hosted the city's distinguished visitors. Joseph Angell Young, Brigham Young's son, owned it for a time.

By the 1980s the house had outlived its builders and its purpose. Khashoggi's planners drew their towers around it rather than through it, folding a finished 19th-century mansion into a plan that would itself never finish. The house survived. The towers meant to surround it did not.

A railroad depot became a hotel lobby

Union Pacific built its Salt Lake City depot in 1908 and 1909, at the peak of American railroad travel. Trains once filled the tracks behind its street-facing façade. Rail traffic faded through the 20th century, and the building's original purpose faded with it.

The depot found new life late. In 2024 it reopened as the lobby and public rooms of a hotel, part of the larger Gateway retail district built up around it. A building raised for one era's certainty about the future ended up serving a use nobody who built it could have guessed.