Exchange still 'historic, thriving'

SALT LAKE CITY — Samuel Newhouse was a man with grand ideas. As the son of Jewish immigrants who made enough money as a New York businessman to go out west, invest in mining and make lots more money, he saw great potential for commerce in Salt Lake City. Specifically, for the south end of downtown Salt Lake City, which he wanted to develop to compete with Mormon business interest at the north end of Main Street.

Newhouse's vision came to fruition in Exchange Place, which he hoped could be the "Wall Street of the West."

Sadly, Newhouse's money ran out before his ideas, so the district never became quite what he envisioned. Still, Exchange Place has been a cornerstone of business for more than 100 years.

This area is the focus of free tours being offered by the Utah Heritage Foundation and sponsored by the Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance this summer. Tours will take place Saturday and again on Aug. 13. They will feature four buildings: the Boston Building, the Newhouse Building, the Commercial Club Building and the Salt Lake Mining and Stock Exchange Building. Tours begin every five minutes at each building between 10 a.m. and noon (the last tours start at 11:30 a.m.). The buildings can be visited in any order.

Alison Flanders of the Utah Heritage Foundation says the idea of tours "is to highlight buildings that are generally not accessible to the public or that the public might not have reasons to go inside, but that are historic treasures in the city."

It's easy to take historical architecture for granted, she says, "without realizing how it has influenced the city and the community then and now."

The Boston Building, completed in 1908, and the Newhouse Building, finished in 1910, are twin towers considered to be Salt Lake's first "skyscrapers." Eleven stories high, they once dwarfed everything else in the city. The Boston Building was named after one of Newhouses's mines; the other building he named after himself.

The two buildings were actually built to resemble classical columns, says Flanders, with three separate parts: base, middle and capital. The lion motifs on the Boston Building were a symbol of industry; the buffalo, a sign of the West. The sculpture of a woman on the Newhouse building was said to be the gentile version of the angel atop the Salt Lake Temple.

The buildings were designed by Henry Ives Cobb, a noted Chicago and New York architect.

Although the exteriors of the two buildings are similar, the interiors are very different. The Newhouse Building is done in marble; the Boston interior is equally grand, but done in tile and wood.