Intermountain Health has filed a planning permit application for a 10-story hospital at the former Sears site in Salt Lake City. Designs pair the inpatient tower with a seven-story medical office building, two garages, three public plazas and a rooftop helipad. Planning commission review comes next.
Intermountain Health has moved its proposed downtown Salt Lake City hospital into formal municipal review, submitting a planning permit application accompanied by the first detailed design package for the vacant block at State Street and 800 South.
Drawings filed with the city show a 10-story inpatient tower joined to a seven-story medical office building, with structured parking divided between two garages. Roughly 500 stalls would sit on the northern portion of the block, and a second structure west of Main Street would add close to 700 spaces, linked back to the campus by a pedestrian bridge. A helipad appears atop the main tower.
Ground level programming traces back to a 2024 agreement between the health system and the city, reached after council members questioned how a facility of this scale would affect pedestrian movement at the eastern edge of downtown. That agreement set a floor of one acre of green space and required publicly accessible ground floor retail, including a pharmacy. Three plazas now occupy corners of the block, one arranged for food truck vendors, with trees and public art distributed across them.
Environmental work preceded the application. Crews finished addressing contaminated soil earlier this summer on ground that has sat largely unused since the department store anchoring it closed in 2018.
Separate filings identify the project as a replacement for LDS Hospital, a 120-year-old facility in the Avenues neighborhood, though the system has not publicly addressed the future of that campus. Approval from the planning commission is required before construction can begin, according to reporting by The Salt Lake Tribune.
Intermountain Health is the applicant, operating as a nonprofit health system based in Utah. The property is the former Sears parcel bounded by State Street, 800 South and Main Street in Salt Lake City.