Wally Wright, the Salt Lake City developer who transformed the city’s antique transit barns into the Trolley Square shopping center, died Sunday, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, his family said. He was 84.
When Wright first contemplated the old bus barns at 500 South and 600 East in the late 1960s, they were an eyesore, operating essentially as a garage for the National City Line and later Utah Transit Authority buses and Utah Power maintenance vehicles. The block was filled with junked vehicles, and fenced off by barbed wire.
“There wasn’t a bush or a tree on this place,” Wright told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1997.