Salt Lake City

• 1. Introduction

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  Salt Lake City sits at 4,327 feet above sea level, ringed by mountains that rise more than two miles higher still. Twin Peaks, to the southeast in the Wasatch Range, reaches 11,330 feet, and on a clear day the vertical relief between the valley floor and that summit measures 7,099 feet. It is a city built in a bowl, which turns out to matter enormously, for reasons its founders never anticipated.

  In July 1847, a company of religious refugees arrived in a semi-arid valley that had been home to the Shoshone, Weber Ute, and Paiute for thousands of years. The land technically belonged to Mexico at that moment; the Mexican-American War was still under way. The settlers were seeking a place beyond the reach of the United States government, somewhere they could practice their faith without the violence they had experienced back east. Within four days of arrival, Brigham Young designated the site for what would become the Salt Lake Temple.

  From that specific and desperate beginning, Salt Lake City grew into a place of layered contradictions. It is the most politically liberal city in one of the most conservative states in the nation. It is the industrial banking center of the United States, and also a mountain town where skiing defines civic identity. It hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics under a cloud of bribery scandal, and on the 24th of July 2024 it was formally chosen to host the 2034 Winter Games. Underneath its downtown, two earthquake fault lines were discovered in 2021 to connect, raising the specter of catastrophic damage. And the Great Salt Lake, the geographic fact that gave the city its name, is shrinking, exposing arsenic-laced dust to the millions of people living in the valley below.

• 2. Before the Pioneers

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  The Northwestern Shoshone held the Salt Lake Valley when the first settlers arrived, but the region's Indigenous history stretches far deeper than European contact. The Shoshone, Weber Ute, Paiute, and Western Goshute all dwelt there, and the Goshute had their own names for the landscape: the Jordan River was Pi'o-gwût, City Creek was So'ho-gwût.

  The land was never ceded. No aboriginal title held by the Northwestern Shoshone was ever relinquished by treaty with the United States. That legal and moral fact sits at the base of the city's origin story, unresolved.

  European explorers reached the valley well before the Mormon settlers. Jim Bridger was likely the first, in 1825. U.S. Army officer John C. Frémont surveyed the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Lake Valley in both 1843 and 1845. The Donner Party, a group of ill-fated pioneers traveling overland, passed through the Great Salt Lake Valley in August 1846, just a year before the settlers who would found the city.

  After the 1847 measles outbreak devastated the local Shoshone population, surviving Shoshone residents taught the newcomers to harvest sego lily bulbs for food. The plant, known in Shoshone as 'seego', became a nutritional lifeline during the pioneers' early years. The sego lily was commemorated in 2017 by the Sego Lily Dam, a flood-prevention structure built in the shape of a giant sego lily in Sugar House Park.

• 3. Founding and the Utah War

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  Three enslaved Black men, Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby, arrived in the Salt Lake Valley with the first group of settlers in 1847. Their presence made Utah the only place in the western United States to have African slavery. By 1850-26 slaves were counted in Salt Lake County. In 1852, the territorial legislature formally legalized slavery with the Act in Relation to Service. Congress abolished slavery in all U.S. territories on the 19th of June 1862.

  The city was originally named Great Salt Lake City. The word 'Great' was dropped in 1868. Before that, in 1849, Brigham Young and other territorial leaders proposed the State of Deseret with expansive boundaries and petitioned Congress for statehood. Congress rejected the petition in 1850, established the Utah Territory instead, and named Fillmore as its capital. Great Salt Lake City replaced Fillmore as the territorial capital in 1856.

  Tensions with the federal government over polygamy escalated in 1857, when President James Buchanan removed Young as territorial governor and dispatched federal troops under Albert Sidney Johnston, who would later become a Confederate general. Young refused to recognize the new governor's authority. Buchanan declared the territory in rebellion. The confrontation, known as the Utah War, ended in a standoff. Johnston's forces marched through a city that had been evacuated and set up Camp Floyd, 40 miles south. The church began abandoning polygamy in 1890, releasing a document called 'The Manifesto', which paved the way for Utah statehood in 1896.

• 4. The Grid, the Temple, and the Streets

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  Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, designed the layout of an ideal Mormon city in a document called the 'Plat of the City of Zion,' which specified streets 132 feet wide. Salt Lake City was built to that plan. The southeast corner of Temple Square serves as the origin point, and every address in the Salt Lake Valley is a coordinate within the resulting grid.

  The Salt Lake Temple, built on the block called Temple Square, took 40 years to complete. Construction began in 1853. The temple was dedicated on the 6th of April 1893.

  The city's blocks are 660 feet square and separated by streets 132 feet wide, making them the largest city blocks in the United States. This scale creates a distinctive urban character, including six-lane automobile corridors, but it has also made it easier to add dedicated transit lanes and light rail. Streets wide enough for a wagon and oxen to turn around are wide enough for a modern streetcar.

  Some streets within the numeric grid retain historical names, and some carry honorary names for figures including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk, and John Stockton. These honorary names appear only on street signs and cannot be used for postal addresses. A marine corporal named Adam Galvez, killed in action, is honored on the western portion of 300 South.

• 5. Crossroads and Communities

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  The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 at Promontory Summit, on the north side of the Great Salt Lake. A rail connection to Salt Lake City followed in 1870, triggering waves of migration. Ethnic Chinese workers, many of whom had laid most of the Central Pacific railway, established a Chinatown in Salt Lake City nicknamed 'Plum Alley' that housed around 1,800 residents during the early 20th century. Those buildings and businesses were demolished in 1952.

  The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway, passed through the city in 1913. The city earned its nickname, 'The Crossroads of the West,' through this convergence of rail, road, and commerce. Two major cross-country freeways, I-15 and I-80, now intersect within the city limits.

  The Walker Center, built in 1912 at the corner of Main and 200 South, was the tallest building between Chicago and San Francisco upon its completion. European ethnic groups and missionary organizations built St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in 1874, B'nai Israel Temple in 1890, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Madeleine in 1909, and the Greek Orthodox Holy Trinity Cathedral in 1923. A streetcar system arrived in 1872 and was electrified by 1889; the last trolley ran until 1945, delayed by World War II. Light rail returned when UTA's TRAX opened in 1999.

  Salt Lake City also became home to a Bosnian American community of more than 8,000 people, most of whom arrived during the Bosnian War in the 1990s. The city has the third largest Sri Lankan community in the United States. Mexican President Vicente Fox began his 2006 U.S. tour in Salt Lake City, a reflection of the estimated 300,000 Latinos living across the Wasatch Front.

• 6. Arts, Music, and Festivals

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  The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square was founded in 1847, the same year as the city itself. Its weekly program, Music and the Spoken Word, is the longest-running continuous network broadcast in the world.

  The Utah Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1940. It became a major American orchestra during the long tenure of music director Maurice Abravanel, who led the ensemble from 1947 through 1979. Since 1979 it has performed at Abravanel Hall. In 2002, the orchestra merged with Utah Opera, which was founded in 1978 by Glade Peterson.

  The Utah Arts Festival has been held annually since 1977, drawing an average attendance of 80,000 with around 130 booths for visual artists and five performance venues. The Utah Pride Festival, which started in 1983, has grown into a three-day event with attendance exceeding 50,000, making it one of the nation's largest Pride festivals. Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School, established in 1867 by Episcopal Bishop Daniel Tuttle, is the area's oldest independent school.

  The Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the United States, is headquartered in nearby Park City but holds screenings in Salt Lake City. The University of Utah was one of the original four universities connected to ARPANET, the predecessor to the internet, in 1969, and was the site of the first artificial heart transplant in 1982.

• 7. Earthquakes and a Shrinking Lake

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  In 1997, the Salt Lake Tribune published a front-page report revealing that a county geologist had erased the Warm Springs Fault from earthquake maps of Salt Lake City. The erasure enabled developers to avoid an earthquake hazard assessment when building the downtown Salt Palace convention center. A year after the Tribune story, a fault segment was found at the southern edge of the convention center, and expansion plans were halted.

  In 2021, researchers found that the Warm Springs Fault and the East Bench Fault, two offshoots of the Wasatch Fault, connect underneath downtown Salt Lake City. The regional Wasatch Fault is considered at high risk of producing an earthquake as large as magnitude 7.5. The Salt Lake Valley floor is the ancient lakebed of Lake Bonneville, a body of water that existed at the end of the last ice age, and ancient folds of its shorelines lie underneath the city, amplifying earthquake danger. On the 18th of March 2020, a 5.7 magnitude earthquake hit Magna, just southwest of the city, the largest in the area in modern times; it required the demolition of the 1892 Sears mansion.

  The Great Salt Lake has shrunk by two-thirds from severe drought and water diversions. Around 65% of diverted water goes to agriculture. The receding water has exposed hundreds of square miles of dry lakebed, releasing dust laced with arsenic and other toxic chemicals into the air over a metropolitan area of roughly 1.3 million people. In 2016, Salt Lake's air quality was ranked 6th worst in the nation by the American Lung Association, receiving an F grade for both ozone and particulate matter. The population of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area is projected to double by 2040, a trajectory that will place further pressure on a water supply already at its limits.