Valley Fair Mall on 3500 South in West Valley City, Utah, is 56 years old and still open. It opened in Granger in the summer of 1970, when that part of Salt Lake County was outside any city.
That first mall was one enclosed building with two department stores and a four-screen cinema. By 2015 it had spread onto its own parking fields and reached about 1 million square feet.
Getting bigger didn't hold on to the department stores. Mervyn's closed in 2008. The Macy's in the old ZCMI store closed in 2016, and the mall's own nine-screen cinema shut a year later.
Each closing left a big space empty, so the mall found other uses for most of them. A Megaplex now stands where Mervyn's was. The mall still has over 80 businesses and services open.
How Valley Fair won the Granger site
In the mid-1960s, Doxey-Layton Realty Co. was trying to put a shopping center at 3500 South and 2700 West for the Granger-Hunter area west of Salt Lake City.
Two competing sites were also in play: one backed by ZCMI, the other near 4100 West and 3500 South, where land was being cleared.
The Doxey-Layton site had a fight of its own.
Property owners in the Hunter-Granger Planning District went to court to stop Salt Lake County from issuing more permits for a regional shopping center there, and the case reached the Utah Supreme Court.
On May 24, 1966, the court ruled against them.
ZCMI eventually dropped its own site and joined Doxey-Layton. Winning in court didn't pay for a mall, though.
The project went through financing trouble and a series of backers before construction began in October 1968, and it changed owners again while the building was going up.
By late May 1970, about 93 percent of the space was leased, so the mall that had taken years to start would open almost full.
JCPenney took the north end and was set to open first, in mid-July.
On July 27, 1970, ZCMI opened at the south end with most of the other stores, in what was still unincorporated Salt Lake County.
Fountains in the dark, then skylights
The mall that opened that day put 565,000 square feet under one roof and advertised itself as "Where it's spring year-round."
It was darker inside by design, with the storefronts lit to pull the eye.
Brick floors, tropical plants and sculptures lined a concourse broken up by reflecting pools, small bridges and fountains that changed their flow in sequence.
A four-screen cinema opened that August.
The fountains went first, in 1977.
Three years later Mervyn's opened a new department store on the east side, joined to the mall by a new corridor, and Valley Fair had three anchors instead of two.
Most of what was left of the 1970 look came out in 1986 and 1987, while the mall stayed open around the construction.
The cinema grew from four screens to nine with five small auditoriums added, and a food court opened nearby.
Elsewhere, the old dark look gave way to more skylights and brighter lighting. Center court was rebuilt with a gazebo and clock tower.
By Christmas 1991, a Peanuts village led to Santa's area in the new center court, with Snoopy's airplane hanging above.
Empty storefronts, then ZCMI loses its name
By July 1996, Valley Fair was down to 80 percent occupancy, with room for 11 more stores.
Four national retail bankruptcies had hit its tenants. South Towne Mall was at 93 percent at the time.
Excel Realty Trust bought Valley Fair on the last day of 1996. The mall turned 27 the next July with a cake 24 feet long, meant to feed 4,000 people.
Several stores from the first years were still trading that summer, including Kinney Shoes, Thom McAn, Deseret Book, and Popcorn Cottage, which had opened as Karmelkorn.
ZCMI didn't come through the next few years with its name.
May Department Stores had bought the chain, and on April 18, 2001, the south anchor became Meier & Frank.
The storefronts around it filled back in.
By 2005 Valley Fair was 99 percent leased, and that October Excel's successor sold it to Satterfield Helm Management.
Costco opens and the parking fields fill
Satterfield Helm announced a rebuild in 2006 that called for a Costco, new outdoor stores, a plaza, and a fountain.
The expansion on the south side needed land where Granger Elementary stood.
West Valley City approved $2.5 million in tax-increment money toward a replacement, and the old school was torn down.
A new Granger Elementary went up on the former Glenn Weaver Park site.
Costco was the first big piece.
It started building south of the mall in April 2007 and opened that August, in a warehouse of 150,000 square feet, more than a quarter the size of the whole mall that opened in 1970.
The next phase began in April 2008, and the recession cut parts of it back or pushed them later.
The parking fields kept filling anyway, with Olive Garden on a new restaurant pad in March 2009 and more stores where cars had parked.
Internal streets and a public plaza went in between the new buildings, and cars and people now crossed Valley Fair on streets.
Mervyn's comes down, the Megaplex goes up
Mervyn's closed in 2008 after the chain went bankrupt.
Its 1980 building on the east side was still standing three years later, when the next phase of the rebuild ran short of money.
In November 2011, city officials took up a $5 million contribution from tax revenue the mall itself generated to cover the gap, and the City Council approved it.
Demolition of the Mervyn's building began January 23, 2012.
A new Megaplex, planned with 15 digital auditoriums and a six-story IMAX screen, opened on the site on November 30.
Inside the old mall, work carried on through 2012 and 2013 with new storefronts and another new food court.
By 2014 Valley Fair was drawing more than 5 million visits a year, up from about 3 million in 2009.
Bowling where the Valley Fair movies were
The old ZCMI store, Meier & Frank since 2001, became Macy's after Federated bought May, and in 2016 the Valley Fair Macy's closed.
The mall's own cinema, the one that had grown from four screens to nine, shut in December 2017.
Both spaces had new tenants by the end of 2019.
All Star Bowling & Entertainment opened that November in part of the former theater and food-court area, with bowling, an arcade, laser tag, and bumper cars.
Two months earlier, Hobby Lobby had held its grand opening in the western part of the ZCMI building. It left about 30 percent of the old store empty.
The 1970 Valley Fair mall on the table
That empty east end was still standing when Wasatch Group bought Valley Fair, by early 2024.
In 2025 Wasatch asked the city to rezone the property so it could demolish 183,000 square feet of vacant or underperforming retail, all of it part of the original mall, the ZCMI east end included.
That's roughly a third of the 565,000 square feet that opened in 1970.
In its place would go 620 apartments in three six-story buildings, plus 80,600 square feet of new retail.
The Planning Commission approved the change unanimously on March 26, 2025. It still needed the City Council, and Wasatch had tabled it by August.
The council changed the land-use plan for the area anyway, so the mall site can now carry very-high-density housing as well as stores.
Valley Fair Mall is at 3601 South Constitution Boulevard in West Valley City, Utah, beside the West Valley Central TRAX station.
It opened in 1970 in Granger, then unincorporated Salt Lake County, as an enclosed mall with two department stores.
It's now an indoor-outdoor complex of more than one million square feet, with 81 businesses and services, Costco and the Megaplex among them.
JCPenney still trades at the north end, 56 years after it opened there, and it's the only department store from 1970 still open.
At the south end, where ZCMI opened the same summer, the old store is part Hobby Lobby and part empty.
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