Deseret News | Building block: Salt Lake City was a model of urban planning from the start

Reader comments
Building block: Salt Lake City was a model of urban planning from the start

mystery0 | 6:33 p.m. Aug. 24, 2009

I feel like I can get around Mesa, AZ more efficiently than Salt Lake. The design of freeways (101, 202, and the 60) make me feel like this is how a city should be designed around the grid-like layout. Although internal streets are not in a grid, the overall structure of Mesa is in 1 mile blocks which makes it appear to be far more efficient to me.

Jordan T. | 6:42 p.m. Aug. 24, 2009

If only Salt Lake City was more urban. Things are so spread out in this town and, to get around anywhere, you have to get into your car and drive practically everywhere.

A mean trick | 6:47 p.m. Aug. 24, 2009

Ezra T. Benson built a beautiful, two-story home, with a porch on both levels, white picket fence and a yard filled with fruit trees, on his "prime lot." While preparing to move his family from a log cabin into the new home, President Brigham Young asked him to move to Cache Valley and pioneer that area. President Young suggested that he sell his new home to Daniel H. Wells, President Young's counselor.

Many years later, this story was related to Ezra T. Benson's great-grandson, Ezra Taft Benson (future Church president), by President Heber J. Grant, who called it the "mean trick" that President Young had played on Ezra T. Benson.

(See Ezra Taft Benson, A Biography; by Sheri Dew; Deseret Book; page 7-8.)

Comments continue below

East / West | 7:38 p.m. Aug. 24, 2009

This city is easy to get around in until attempting to to East or West during rush hour on the West side. Thankfully, I don't have to do that anymore. It's terrible. Most anywhere else is pretty good.

Josh | 8:48 p.m. Aug. 24, 2009

I disagree that things are spread out. Not downtown anyway. I've lived in several cities and spent a good bit of time in several major downtowns, and although Salt Lake City's downtown core is small, it is most definitely quite urban. While working downtown, I walked around to stores, apartments, restaurants, etc. a lot. The City Creek project is one of the most significant downtown mixed-use projects in the country right now. Much of the valley is suburban sprawl, but downtown is a nice urban area.

Anonymous | 12:52 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

Nice article and progression pictures DN. As for E T Benson, the cache valley was a beautiful place to have a farm and raise a family. Wish I could have lived there. Mesa, Arizona streets were laid out by the same plan and are very nice...I'll have to agree that the Arizona freeways are absolutely beautiful...efficient and wonderful...of course, we don't ever have to worry about snow, ice and freezing.

SLC has lost it. | 4:33 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

It's too bad that all cities and subdivisions in Utah haven't followed this kind of layout and planning. The streets in downtown used to be numbers instead of names and made it easy to find a location. Now its a nightmare to locate and address and difficult to navigate to any location.

But the downtown layout has lost many of its features and wide streets and an unpleasant place to even drive through. Shopping was once a destination in downtown SLC but greed and ease of traveling with loss of shoppers and homes has turned the downtown in to a ghost town.

New development has not followed any grid pattern in design or use of land and the valley has become a nightmare for the public. It has stifled business development in many cities because business can't be located by an address and limits it to local residents.

It was a great idea for business and public but discarding the grid pattern in city and residential planning has limited growth.

SLC gal | 6:58 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

Downtown was sooooo much prettier in the days before I was born ~sigh~

hmmmmmm | 6:59 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

You do realize that the grid pattern was not original with SLC and the Mormon leadership?

Mohojendaro is the city you wish to google and get educated. SLC is well laid out to me, but the credit for the thinking goes to the middle east.

idea | 7:31 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

It would be a cool book to show the changes in the downtown area. You take the oldest photos you can, and then stand at the same spot today and take the photo. before, and after.

I saw a book on grain elevators in South Dakota that used this idea. Some things had changed, elevators disappeared, elevators remained... but it was fascinating. I think the name of the book was SKYSCRAPERS OF THE PRAIRIE.

SLC should have such a book, or does one already exist?

Density, narrow streets best | 7:40 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

Give me instead a very dense urban core with an intriguing tangle of narrow streets, a scattering of squares and gardens, a subway system and plenty of pedestrian streets, plenty of parking structures but no parking lots, rows of shops but no strip malls, residences above all the shops, not just young unmarrieds and elderly but also families with children, schools and groceries and hardware shops and churches and museums and libraries and cafes and playgrounds.

So: Boston, but not Phoenix; London, but not LA.

Salt Lake has poetential, but we must not fear density, and we must shun the low-density, zero-pedestrian, big-box-cum-parking-lot strip-mall neon wasteland model.

Does anybody agree? Or do you like the Salt Lake Valley as we've let it become?

Margaret | 8:09 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

To my best recollection, Mohenjodaro is an ancient city that no one new anything about until it was excavated and studied in the 20th century. Were there any other cities near it on the Indian subcontinent that continued the grid planning that was started there? It doesn't seem to me that the technology transplanted from India to the Middle east very well. It would be interesting to know.

correct | 8:15 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

The salt lake valley lacks class, box stores, cheapos, rich showing off on the hillsides.

Very tacky. very........

re: hmmmmmm @6:59 | 8:16 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

You're right. Brigham Young and the other brethren totally ripped this idea off from Mohojendaro. I suspect that when they got to the Salt Lake Valley, they said, "Let's set this up like Mohojendaro." And then they selfishly took credit for it. I'm not sure HOW they copied the middle eastern city since none of them had ever been to the middle east, but...

Matthew | 8:16 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

"Idea"
The book you describe does already exist. Salt Lake City Then and Now.

Actually, that isn't the book I own and was thinking of. It is the one I found first on Amazon. I can't remember the name of the one on my shelf, but it has a similar presentation to what you describe too.

re:Density | 8:19 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

I have been to Boston. Awesome city to visit, but awful to try to get around.

RE: Hmmmmmm | 8:20 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

A city in the middle east? Right, I'm sure Brigham Young knew a lot about some city in the middle east. LOL

Anonymous | 8:22 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

Yes...everyone touts B.Y. as making such a great decision to have wide streets. Now we are suffering for it.

Roads costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per land mile for upkeep. If our roads were half as wide it would cost us half as much to maintain.

With closer streets we would have density and walkability not car dependence.

In the end - B.Y. cursed us.

RE "Density, narrow streets best" - I agree 100%

Jeff | 8:26 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

This is a great article! Thanks. I like the reader comment about making a book with photos then/now, that would be awesome and I'd buy it. I liked the look of Main Street from 1910-1960 the best, wish it still looked like that. Also, to the Mesa AZ reader, yeah your freeways are nice, EXCEPT for the photocop radar camera's every half of a mile and the 65- 55 - 65 - 55 -65 -55 mph speed limit so that you are sure to get a ticket. That whole photocop thing is EVIL!

Re; hmmmmmm | 8:30 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

Actually, the design for SLC was based on the layout of Nauvoo, which was based on Joseph Smith's idea of city planning and organization.

Which, in turn, was based on the prevailing grid-style systems common in many New England towns.

It's highly unlikely that the average US citizen in the 1840's had ever heard of Mohojendaro. There wasn't an internet back then, you know.

planner | 9:51 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

Acutally ... the layout of Nauvoo was based on the "Zion Plat". Which is the plat map Joseph Smith came up with for Independence, MO. in 1831. It's well-thought out and served his plan for a city beautifully in 1831. Considering it's age, it still works very effectively today. Who seriously considers Boston and London well-thought out plans?

Anonymous | 10:25 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

Ancient Asian cities were laid out on the cardinal points with a temple in the middle. We see that also in the ancient C.A. cities whose style was transported here.
Watched an excellent roundtable discussion of architects in Denver talk about the demise of US cities and they said the only one which can be salvaged now is SLC because the excellent original planning.
They then discussed how the placements of the malls scrunched toward the north end of the city ruined the shopping in SLC. They all confirmed that the malls should have been spaced farther apart, north to south, allowing trafficking between them for smaller stores.

Anonymous | 10:43 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

"From the very beginning, Salt Lake City was a planned city".
_____________________________

Perhaps from the begining, but not now. The narrowing of mainstreet was done in a dumb way.

SLC is a very unwalkable community. Most of the building fronts have nothing to do with something a consumer would want to go in for, such as a resturant or a shop.

It requires a car to do anything.

I've been to cities that are much more liveable and walkable

newbie | 10:48 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

I have been living here for 7 weeks now.
Bless the grid system! I can get around, and it is way, way nicer than the Boston way.

BobP | 10:52 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

If you want density try Seoul, Korea. 12 million people livng in an area about the size of Salt Lake City. Personally I don't like cities. I presently live in a town of 800 people right on the sea.

I can remember cruising Main a few times when I was at BYU.

Thanks Deseret News | 11:10 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

I just love these kind of articles - I'm so pleased that I've been seeing these in Desnews.com lately. Great progression of photos, just makes me want MORE. How many rich, meaningful stories can be drawn from historical progression from a small city lot to a whole city or valley - unlimited stories for years to come! Much appreciated...

JSmith | 11:26 a.m. Aug. 25, 2009

The way I understand it the streets of Boston were adapted from cow paths.

BH | 12:56 p.m. Aug. 25, 2009

Great article. Very interesting history.

If you have ever spent any time in other large cities, you come to appreciate the design and planning that went in to downtown SLC.

Some may say that the wide streets are now a curse, but evidence of the demise of the downtown areas in other large cities is proof that the narrow streets do not work. Downtown SLC is still live and vibrant. Yes, it doesn't look that way right now with all the construction. But only a few blocks from the construction, and even in the heart of it all, is a community that continues.

JSmith: Yes, it is my understanding too that Boston streets evolved from livestock trails. And London wasn't too much different. London streets evolved from foot paths between smaller neighborhoods.

Anonymous | 1:28 p.m. Aug. 25, 2009

I like the concept of the grid system. Once SLC was very easy to navigate. Main Street was once a gem. That was then.

I like great cites. America has few. I'm bless to live near one, San Francisco. San Francisco was both curse and blessed by its geography. Unlike SLC, San Francisco can blame its 1909 earthquake for ruining many of its old charming buildings. Salt Lake used planned destruction.

It was once Brigham Young's goal to set up a Mormon Empire in California. He send Sam Brannan on a ship, the Brooklyn, to set of a Colony in San Francisco. Lucky, the US Army, beat him to San Francisco. Brigham Young settle on the Valley of the Great Salt Lake where no government would interfer in his empire.

During the Gold Rush, Brigham Young railed to his saints against heading west to California. Sam Brannan and California Mormons enjoyed living in a less theocratic environment in California.

This is why Utah and California Mormons view their church differently even today.

The grid system fit a culture comfortable with nearly aligned rectangles. The grid system served its purpose well, it defined order.

Sneaky Jimmy | 3:51 p.m. Aug. 25, 2009

(alias Sam Brannan). Thanks Anonymous. I was wondering why I'm don' think like Utah Mormons.

Boston | 4:32 p.m. Aug. 25, 2009

My Dad was raised in the Byfield, Georgetown, & Haverhill areas of Massachusetts. He lived in Saugus for several years after marrying my Mother, and then moved west to Salt Lake City in 1935, where I was born in 1941. One thing he often said about Boston Streets: "...you make one wrong turn in Boston, and you will see a lot of Boston."

I love Boston (and the Red Sox) and all of it's crooked narrow streets (many them one-way), and have been back there uncountable times on business and pleasure throughout my life. It has a wonderful charm, but I would never live there over the Salt Lake (now Bountiful) area. It feel's more wide-open to me here, and indeed, it is easier to get around. I guess my blood (literally) is of the East, but my heart is of the West.

Boston Travel Suggestion: Park your car and use the subway if you're going into Boston. It's easier to get around and much more enjoyable that way; don't forget to take your GPS with you.

Density (again) | 7:35 p.m. Aug. 25, 2009

I didn't use the Boston example lightly--I moved from Boston to Salt Lake. I've also lived in London.

To those who object that the winding streets of Boston evolved from cow-paths: that's what makes them so nice: the variety, the feeling that not everything is geometrically rigid, and the sense of historical place preserved in the very shape of the city. If convenience is your only standard, well then, yes, right angles for everything. Not for me, though.

To those who object to density: you want a farm, then, not a city. Cities are best when they're packed. Downtown Salt Lake City is not only dull, but dangerous: its wide-open spaces are empty of people after business hours. Lots of people on the street means safety. I'm safer walking down Broadway at 65th St. at midnight than Second South and State at nine.

BH@12:56 is dead wrong to claim that Salt Lake is vibrant compared to other cities. A visit even to Portland or Providence or Annapolis, let alone Boston or San Francisco, will disabuse you of that fantasy.

SLC has potential. Run arrow streets through the big blocks.

Marceau | 12:18 a.m. Oct. 9, 2009

City Creek Project? Never heard of it.

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