Mall developers hired by the LDS Church think we're so out of shape and delicate that we need a bridge across Main Street to help us shop in the $1 billion City Creek Center.

It's not just a simple bridge. The thing will be enclosed in glass - to protect us from the elements - and could include "people movers." Shoppers won't even have to walk if they don't want to.

I can't believe it's gotten that bad - our TV-watching and Big Mac-eating has made us too soft to climb a flight of stairs or punch an elevator button before making the 50-foot trek across Main Street - all under our own power.

In downtown's heyday 50 years ago, Main Street was teeming with pedestrians, people with hardy pioneer ancestry walking from ZCMI on South Temple to Auerbach's on 300 South. Nobody collapsed from exposure or strain. This isn't Fargo, N.D., after all. In wintertime, they wore coats. In summer, hats.

"We're not made of sugar. We won't melt in the rain or snow," Shirley McLaughlan told City Council members at a hearing Tuesday night.

But Michigan-based executives for Taubman Centers Inc. know best, I suppose. They're in the business of building malls and keeping people circulating, lugging shopping bags in one hand and credit cards in the other.

They've painted glorious watercolors of a two-block mall that includes "European" arches, "piazzas," and their own version of the Spanish Steps. It will be a little bit of Rome adjacent to the Main Street Plaza's "little bit of Paris."

And it all hinges on this bridge. Without a skywalk, shoppers apparently will get confused - "trapped," says Taubman Design Vice President Ron Loch - on the upper level of the shopping mall. They might have to pause to make their way down to the street. And if they have to do that, Loch says, they might not come back. Apparently, any interruption in spending is too long.

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson calls the sky bridge a "gerbil cage."

As many architects and planners have pointed out, the mall developers need the skywalk bsecause they have designed two enclosed malls not unlike the Crossroads Mall and ZCMI Center fortresses they are replacing - albeit with retractable atriums and "expressions" of City Creek (that means fountains).

"This bridge is a symptom, not a disease," architect David Scheer said. He believes Salt Lake City is poised to repeat the "devastating mistake" of building two facing, self-contained malls 30 years ago.

In the coming weeks, City Council members will decide whether to amend city ordinances to allow a sky bridge on Main Street. But lame-duck Anderson refuses to sell the air rights to the church.

In the end, Taubman will have to wait until a more sympathetic mayor - who shares its low expectations of Utahns' constitutions - is in office.

walsh @sltrib.com