The center Holladay
The only part of the city you can park once and walk
Holladay Village, four blocks doing a downtown's job
A public plaza, a park, a grocery with a mezzanine over the square, a county library with a recording studio in it, and a nearly hundred year old city hall wrapped in scaffolding while it is pinned back together through 2027. This is the whole civic center of a city of about thirty two thousand, and here is how to use it.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
The short answer
Holladay Village is the small town center at the crossing of Holladay Boulevard and Murray-Holladay Road, and it is the one part of the city you can park once and walk. Inside about a ten minute stroll you have a public plaza used for events, City Hall Park on the block beside it, a grocery with mezzanine seating over the square, a short run of independent kitchens and coffee, and a county library a little west along Murray-Holladay Road. The city hall building itself is closed for a seismic retrofit through 2027, so the counter is temporarily in Millcreek. Come on a weekday morning to see the village run, and on a July or August concert Saturday to see what the plaza was built for.
Start here
Four blocks standing in for a city center
Holladay Village is the crossing of Holladay Boulevard and Murray-Holladay Road, roughly between 4580 and 4700 South, and it is the only part of this city you can usefully park once and walk. On the ground that is a plaza used for events, a public park on the block beside it, the city hall building at 4580 South 2300 East, a grocery, a run of independent restaurants and coffee, and a county library a few minutes west along Murray-Holladay Road.
It is a deliberate thing rather than an accident of retail. A redevelopment area was drawn over this crossroads, and the modern village went in on top of it: a commercial block with retail and offices above, homes alongside, and the plaza in the middle as the piece of public ground the whole thing is arranged around. The grocery anchor, Harmons Holladay Market, opened in February 2018 at 4675 Holladay Boulevard East, a 37,456 square foot store with a mezzanine and outdoor balcony seating over the square.
What sits underneath all of that is older than almost anything else in the valley. This crossroads is on the ground the 1847 Spring Creek settlement started from, and Holladay has spent recent years putting that back on the surface: markers at public places, exhibits, and a history walk through the park with four sidewalk thresholds carrying short poems. It is the closest thing Holladay has to a museum, and it is a walk you take on the sidewalk.
The village in numbers
1847
the settlement this crossroads grew from
4
sidewalk thresholds carrying poems in the park
37,456
square feet in the grocery anchor
2300 E
where city hall sits, out for a seismic retrofit
The building in the scaffolding
A schoolhouse from the 1920s being pinned back together
The most interesting municipal story in this valley right now is not a new building. It is an old one the city decided to keep, and it changes how the village works for the year and a half the building is out of use.
City hall at 4580 South 2300 East is a nearly hundred year old building that started life as Holladay Elementary. It is classified as unreinforced masonry, which in a seismic state is the category that eventually forces a decision: retrofit it, or leave the ground floor of local government inside a building that is not expected to survive the earthquake it is designed against. Holladay chose to retrofit, and closed the building in April 2026 to do it.
The retrofit is estimated at about 9.75 million dollars, funded mostly by a twenty year municipal bond, with roughly 1.7 million dollars expected from a federal resilience program toward the seismic work. The job was scoped at twelve to eighteen months, and the city took an eighteen month lease, April 2026 through September 2027, on the former Millcreek city hall at 3330 South 1300 East.
That lease is the detail worth carrying if you have business with the city. For roughly a year and a half, the counter you need is in the next city north, weekdays eight to five, on 801-272-9450. Building permits, business licenses, park bookings and the planning counter all moved with it. The council still meets and the city still runs; it just does not run from the village for now.
None of this touched the ground outside. City Hall Park and Holladay Village Plaza both stayed open and the arts calendar carried on without a break, which is why the free summer concerts still play on the same lawn. If you visit the village expecting the civic centerpiece, you will find a wrapped building beside a working park, and that is the honest state of it until the building reopens after its retrofit.
City hall, while it is out of the building
Projects like this slip, and an eighteen month lease is a plan rather than a promise. Check the current reopening date before you time anything around it.
The year on the plaza
An arts council carrying the calendar of a whole city
Holladay does not have a festival season the way a resort town does, and it does not have the drop-in life of a busy main street. What it has is a program, and the program is genuinely the reason the village works. The Holladay Arts Council and the city's historical commission between them put something free on the plaza or the park lawn across most of the warm half of the year, and it adds up to thousands of visits.
The anchor of the warm months is the free summer concert series: Saturday evenings through July and August, with the music starting at eight, on the lawn at City Hall Park, run by the arts council with Excellence in the Community. It is the one that most changes what a Saturday in Holladay feels like, an ordinary suburban lawn with a stage and no ticket, so bring something to sit on. Late in the summer, painters work across the city for a plein air weekend that finishes in the village, and the Blue Moon Festival takes over Holladay Village Plaza at 4700 Holladay Boulevard East for one late-summer evening, with an artisan market, live music, food and interactive art.
The rest of the year fills in around those. The historical commission runs a speaker series, a preservation month, a history fair and a historic home tour that draws a crowd from well beyond the city, which says something about how much of this bench is worth looking at from the street. In December a makers' market pairs with the city tree lighting on the square. Dates on all of these move year to year, so check holladayarts.org for the current lineup rather than a listing site, which ages badly on volunteer run events.
The council has also been building a permanent layer, not only a seasonal one. Rooted Together, funded by a Salt Lake County grant, put a history walk into City Park with four sidewalk thresholds carrying short poems, alongside exhibits at city hall and history markers at public places around Holladay. When the hall reopens after its retrofit those exhibits go back with it, and in the meantime the outdoor half of the project is the half that still works.
A full calendar of free events, in a city whose largest indoor room is a grocery mezzanine.
What is actually on the block
A grocery, a library, and a short run of independent kitchens
This is a small commercial core and the honest way to describe it is by category rather than by name, because restaurant rosters on a block this size turn over faster than any page can track.
The anchor is Harmons Holladay Market at 4675 Holladay Boulevard East, which opened in February 2018. At 37,456 square feet with a 2,400 square foot mezzanine and outdoor balcony seating, it works as more than a shop: the mezzanine is one of the few places in the city where you can sit indoors, with a view over the square, without booking anything. In a village with no movie theater and no civic hall in use, that matters more than it sounds.
Around it sits the eating. The mix runs to independent kitchens rather than chains, mostly small rooms with a dozen tables, covering coffee, deli, pizza, sushi, tacos and burgers within a few minutes' walk of each other. Names on a block this size turn over, so treat any specific list as perishable; the city guide at the Holladay city guide carries a current snapshot if you want one, with the same caution attached.
The other public building is a few minutes west. The Salt Lake County library branch at 2150 East Murray-Holladay Road keeps long weekday evenings, Monday to Thursday from ten in the morning until nine at night, then ten to six on Friday and Saturday, and is closed Sunday. It carries a CreateSpace with a recording studio, 3D printers, and sewing and embroidery machines, which is a genuinely useful thing to know about a suburban branch library and is not advertised anywhere on the street.
Find each place
Holladay Village Plaza
The event square at 4700 Holladay Boulevard East, where the late-summer festival happens. Directions
City Hall Park
The lawn at 4580 South 2300 East: the playground, the history walk and the summer concerts. Directions
Harmons Holladay Market
The grocery anchor at 4675 Holladay Boulevard East, with mezzanine and balcony seating over the square. Directions
Holladay Library
The county branch at 2150 East Murray-Holladay Road, with a recording studio and 3D printers in the CreateSpace. Directions
The village is not the only commercial ground in Holladay. A mile or so west, the former Cottonwood Mall site on Highland Drive is being rebuilt as Holladay Hills, a large mixed-use project. As of 2026 its first pieces are open, including a 52,000 square foot coworking building, with much of the retail, dining and housing still under construction. The mouths page covers where that project actually stands, and separates what is open from what is only approved.
Using it well
Park once, and pick the right hour
The village rewards a single parking decision. Leave the car in one of the commercial lots off Murray-Holladay Road or on a residential block a few minutes out, and everything here is inside a ten minute walk of it. The one evening a year that stops being true is the Blue Moon Festival, when the sensible move is to park further out than feels necessary and treat the last five minutes as part of the outing.
Hours are the other thing to plan against. The park restrooms are open March through October and locked overnight, so a bright November afternoon on the lawn is a visit with no facilities attached. The library keeps the longest hours of anything here and is the reliable indoor option on a hot afternoon or a cold one. City business, until the hall reopens after its retrofit, is not in the village at all.
If you are here to decide something rather than to spend an afternoon, come twice. A weekday morning shows you the village as it actually runs, which is quiet, small and functional. A Saturday evening in July or August shows you the version the city built the plaza for. Both are true and they answer different questions, and the gap between them is most of what people mean when they argue about whether Holladay has a center.
What you will find elsewhere
- The Cottonwood Mall's history and the phasing of Holladay Hills. That is a redevelopment on Highland Drive rather than village ground, and it sits on the mouths page of this companion.
- Cost of living, school assignments, neighborhood options and home prices. The Holladay city guide carries all of that at length, and it is not repeated here.
- Downtown Salt Lake City, about twenty minutes north. Temple Square, the arenas, the theaters and the airport connection are a county subject, on the downtown page.
- The bench trail that runs above the whole east side. That through route belongs to no single city and is written once at region level.
Scott Buehler
Moving Utah About Scott
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Read the pageQuick answers
The village, answered
The small town center at the crossing of Holladay Boulevard and Murray-Holladay Road, roughly between 4580 and 4700 South, and the only part of Holladay you can park once and walk. It holds a public plaza used for events, City Hall Park on the block beside it, the city hall building, a grocery anchor with a mezzanine over the square, a short run of independent kitchens and coffee, and a Salt Lake County library branch a few minutes west. It sits on the ground the 1847 Spring Creek settlement started from.
At 4700 Holladay Boulevard East, at the Murray-Holladay Road crossroads. It is the city's event square rather than a park: the Blue Moon Festival takes it over for a late-summer evening, and it carries other events through the year. City Hall Park, where the free summer concerts play, is a separate piece of ground a short walk away at 4580 South 2300 East. People mix up the two constantly, and the events are split between them.
Because the usual one is being retrofitted. The building at 4580 South 2300 East is a nearly hundred year old former Holladay Elementary classified as unreinforced masonry, and the city closed it in April 2026 for seismic work estimated at about 9.75 million dollars. Staff took an eighteen month lease on the former Millcreek city hall at 3330 South 1300 East, April 2026 through September 2027, and the counter runs there weekdays from eight to five on 801-272-9450.
A permanent history installation funded by a Salt Lake County grant. It put a history walk through Holladay City Park, including four sidewalk thresholds carrying short poems, alongside exhibits at city hall and history markers at public places around the city. The outdoor half is usable now; the city hall exhibits go back when the building reopens. It runs alongside the historical commission's speaker series, preservation month, history fair and historic home tour.
Saturday evenings through July and August, with the music starting at eight, on the lawn at City Hall Park. The Holladay Arts Council runs the series with Excellence in the Community, and it is free to attend. Bring something to sit on, because the venue is a park lawn rather than a built stage with seating. The current lineup comes from holladayarts.org rather than from listing sites, which age badly on volunteer run events.
The Salt Lake County branch at 2150 East Murray-Holladay Road is open Monday to Thursday from ten in the morning to nine at night, then ten to six on Friday and Saturday, and closed Sunday. Beyond the ordinary lending collection it carries a CreateSpace with a recording studio, 3D printers, and sewing and embroidery machines. That is an unusually well equipped maker space for a suburban branch, it is free to use with a county library card, and it is not advertised from the street.
A summer market has run in the village in past seasons, and the arts council also runs a makers' market in December paired with the city tree lighting. Market schedules on a square this size change from year to year, and several listing sites carry stale entries for them, so the reliable route is the city calendar or the arts council rather than an aggregator. If a specific Saturday matters, call the city before you drive out for it.
Yes, and it is the only part of the city where walking is genuinely the point. The plaza, the park, the grocery and the restaurants are all inside about ten minutes on foot of each other, and the library is a few minutes further west along Murray-Holladay Road. Outside those blocks Holladay goes back to a bench city of loose streets, some of which never got sidewalks by design, so plan on driving between the village and anywhere else.
For an hour, yes, and for an evening in July or August, more than that. It is a small, real town center in a valley full of arterial strip retail, with a history walk set into the sidewalk and a mountain filling the sky at the end of the street. It is not a destination in the sense of a full day out, because it is four blocks. Come on a weekday morning to see how it runs, and on a concert Saturday to see what it was built for.
A village core is why this bench prices the way it does
Walkable ground in this valley is rare enough that the blocks around a crossroads like this one carry a premium, and the premium is real whether or not you use the plaza. If you are weighing a Holladay address, tell me what matters to you about being near it and I will put you with a Salt Lake County partner agent who works these streets, and stay on the financing side myself.
Or call Scott: (435) 357-4345or send Scott a message
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