The centre Murray
A downtown rewritten by ordinance, with two restorations already open
Murray City Centre, and the difference between a code and a building.
On 25 June 2025 the Municipal Council replaced one downtown zone with five form districts, and within five months of each other a 1938 theatre and an 1899 mansion both reopened into that ground after long closures. Here is what the code actually says, what the two restorations cost and involved, why the corner nearest the station is the district to watch, and which parts of this are standing rather than drawn.
Southern Utah is my home turf. Murray is not, so these pages are researched rather than lived: checked against city, county and venue sources, and dated so you can see how fresh they are. For the on-the-ground work here I lean on a Salt Lake County partner agent.
Start here
A built out city deciding what its middle is allowed to become.
Murray has a historic core and always has. The blocks around State Street and Vine carry city hall, the park, an 1899 mansion, a 1938 cinema and a residential grid that has been on the National Register as the Murray Downtown Residential Historic District since 2005, with buildings spanning roughly 1870 to 1954. What it has not had for a long time is a downtown that functions as one, because the century in between turned State Street into an arterial rather than a street.
The city has been working on that since its 2017 general plan called for a redesign of the core, and the decisive step landed on 25 June 2025, when the Municipal Council adopted the City Center Form Based Code. That replaced the single Murray City Center District zone with five separate form districts, each with its own purpose and its own allowable uses, and it put a five member architectural review committee between a developer and the Planning Commission.
Two buildings then came back inside five months of each other. The Murray Museum reopened in the restored Cahoon Mansion on 2 May 2025, and the Murray Theater reopened on 26 September 2025 after eight years dark. Neither is a private venture. Both are civic restorations paid for with public money and grants, put deliberately into the ground the new code is trying to activate, and that sequencing is not a coincidence.
The centre by the numbers
25 June 2025
the code adopted by the council
5
form districts replacing one
333 seats
in the theatre that reopened in September
1899
the mansion the museum reopened in
The code
One zone became five on the twenty fifth of June.
A form based code regulates what a building looks like and how it meets the street rather than only what happens inside it, which is the tool cities reach for when the problem is that a downtown does not feel like one. Murray split its single downtown zone into five, and the names tell you the intent.
| The district | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Civic Center | The institutional heart, around city hall and the civic buildings |
| Boulevard | The State Street frontage, the arterial the city is trying to turn back into a street |
| Neighborhood Corridor | The connecting streets that carry local business rather than through traffic |
| Residential Transition | The step down from the commercial core into the historic residential grid behind it |
| Transit Neighborhood | The south west corner, nearest Murray Central station, and the densest of the five |
District names and the 25 June 2025 adoption date as published by the City of Murray, checked 7 August 2026. The governing ordinance is 17.170 and the design guidelines sit alongside it. A five member architectural review committee reviews new construction and major alterations and makes recommendations to the Planning Commission.
The Residential Transition district is the one that shows the city has been paying attention. Almost every downtown revitalisation in a valley suburb runs aground on the same conflict: the new mixed use buildings arrive at the back fence of a hundred year old residential street and the neighbours, quite reasonably, object. Writing the step down into the code as its own district, rather than leaving it to be argued case by case, is an attempt to settle that fight in advance.
The Transit Neighborhood district is the one with the most upside and the most exposure. It takes the corner nearest Murray Central station, which is the only place in this city where a commuter rail platform and a light rail platform sit together, and it is where the density is meant to go. That is exactly the right place for it and it is also the place where what gets built will be judged hardest, because a transit district that produces car parks has failed at the only thing it was for.
The architectural review committee is the quiet detail. Five members, reviewing new construction and major alterations, reporting to the Planning Commission. It is the mechanism that decides whether a form based code actually shapes anything or becomes a document that developers route around, and it meets on a published schedule. Anybody weighing a purchase near the core can watch that committee's agenda and learn more about the next decade of this ground than from any masterplan drawing.
Adopted zoning is permission, not buildings. The code passed in June 2025 and the buildings it contemplates are a development cycle away, at best. Treat everything on this page in two columns: what is delivered, which is a zoning ordinance, a review committee, a restored theatre and a restored museum, and what is announced, which is the mixed use downtown those things are meant to produce. Both are real. Only one of them is standing, and confusing the two is how people buy a drawing.
The theatre
Seventeen feet of excavation under a stage from 1938.
The Murray Theater opened on 28 October 1938 at 4961 South State Street, an Art Moderne house that is one of the better surviving examples of the style in this part of the state and is on the National Register of Historic Places. It then sat unused and silent for eight years while a restoration that was supposed to be relatively contained turned into something else entirely.
The something else was underneath the stage. Crews found severe foundation failure there and had to excavate seventeen feet below ground and pour new footings, which is the reason an opening originally slated for early 2024 arrived in the autumn of 2025 and the reason the bill ran past three million dollars. That is the sort of discovery that kills projects in smaller cities, and this one carried on.
What came back is a 333 seat room returned to its 1938 appearance and fitted out with laser projection, new production and sound systems, and an orchestra pit on an elevator lift. The public reopening ran across the weekend of 26 to 28 September 2025, with the first night headlined by Loren Allred, who grew up here. Restoring the look of 1938 while putting a lift in the orchestra pit is the whole brief of a civic restoration in one sentence: keep the room, modernise the machinery.
For the city centre this building matters more than its seat count suggests. Three hundred and thirty three seats is small, but it is 333 people arriving on State Street on an evening, in a district that has been trying to give people a reason to be there after six o'clock. Whether the code produces the restaurants those people would walk to is the open question. The ranked list covers going to a show here rather than the building work behind it.
They kept the room exactly as 1938 left it and put an elevator lift in the orchestra pit.
The museum
An 1899 mansion bought in 2017 and reopened in 2025.
The second of the two restorations is quieter, cost less and arguably says more about the city's intentions, because a municipality does not buy a private house and spend years on it unless it has decided something about where its centre is.
The John P. Cahoon Mansion was built in 1899 at 4872 South Poplar Street and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1983. The city bought it in 2017 with the specific intention of turning it into a permanent home for a museum collection that had outgrown the space it was in, and the purchase and restoration together came to somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million dollars, including significant state grants.
The Murray Museum reopened inside it on 2 May 2025. In the April before that, Preservation Utah gave the project its Rehabilitation and Restoration Award, which is a useful independent signal about the quality of the work rather than the enthusiasm of the people who commissioned it. A city can always tell you its restoration went well; a preservation body giving it an award is a second opinion.
The reason this belongs on a page about the city centre rather than only on a list of things to do is proximity. The mansion, the theatre, city hall and the park sit within a short walk of one another in the historic core, on ground the new code has now zoned across its Civic Center and Residential Transition districts. Putting the museum in a listed house on a residential street, rather than in a unit on the arterial, is a decision about what kind of centre this is meant to be.
The transit corner
Two railways meeting at one address.
The Transit Neighborhood district exists because of a specific piece of infrastructure that has been on the ground since 1999, and it is the strongest card the city centre holds.
| The element | The detail |
|---|---|
| Opened | 4 December 1999 |
| Light rail | TRAX platform at 5144 Cottonwood Street, served by both the Blue and the Red lines |
| Commuter rail | FrontRunner platform at 40 West Vine Street, on the regional line |
| Platforms | One island platform each for TRAX and FrontRunner, two tracks apiece |
| Parking | About 1,095 combined spaces, plus four bicycle lockers |
| Why it matters here | It is the only point in the city where light rail and commuter rail meet, and the new code puts its densest district around it |
Station details as published by UTA, checked 7 August 2026. Line assignments and service patterns change with UTA's periodic service revisions, so check the current system map for any specific journey rather than relying on a line name printed here.
The thing worth understanding about this corner is that the transit came first by a quarter of a century. The station opened in December 1999, the smelter ground beside it was cleared for redevelopment by 2002, the hospital opened on that ground in 2007, and the zoning that is supposed to make sense of all three was adopted in June 2025. The city is writing the code around infrastructure it already has rather than promising infrastructure it hopes to get.
That is an unusual and rather encouraging position for a downtown plan to be in. The commonest failure mode for a transit oriented district is a plan that depends on a line being built; this one depends on a line that has been carrying people since the last century, next to a hospital campus employing thousands, in a city at the geometric centre of its county.
The 1,095 parking spaces are worth pausing on, because they say something the platform count does not. A great many of the people who use this interchange drove to reach it, from Murray and from the cities either side, and a park and ride of that size behaves like a small employment site at two fixed hours a day. What that does to the surrounding streets is set out on the movers page.
The honest column
What is standing, and what is still an ordinance.
| Delivered | Announced or enabled |
|---|---|
| The City Center Form Based Code, adopted 25 June 2025 | The mixed use downtown the five districts are written to produce |
| A five member architectural review committee, meeting on a published schedule | The buildings that committee has yet to review |
| The Murray Theater, 333 seats, reopened 26 September 2025 | The evening economy a 333 seat room is supposed to help support |
| The Murray Museum in the Cahoon Mansion, reopened 2 May 2025 | The walkable civic circuit joining museum, theatre, city hall and park |
| Murray Central station, both platforms, since 1999 | The density the Transit Neighborhood district permits around it |
The left column is verifiable today. The right column is permission, intention and drawings, which is the normal state of any downtown plan in its first year and is not a criticism. The distinction only becomes a problem when somebody buys on the strength of the right column while paying for the left.
The fair reading of Murray's city centre in 2026 is that the difficult, unglamorous parts are done. Zoning is rewritten and adopted. A review mechanism exists and meets. Two historic buildings are restored, open and in public hands. The transit is thirty years old and works. None of those things photograph well and all of them are the prerequisites for everything else.
What has not happened is the visible part: the new buildings, the ground floor uses, the reason to walk from the theatre to somewhere for a drink afterwards. That is a development cycle away and it depends on capital markets rather than on councils. Anybody weighing an address here should price the delivered column and treat the announced one as upside, which is the same advice this site gives about every announced project in the state.
Keep reading
More of Murray on The Local.
Things to do
The top 8, ranked
A 63 acre park on a creek, a theatre back after eight dark years, and a farm from 1886.
Read the guideThe park
Murray Park, end to end
Sixty three acres, a creek down the middle, an arboretum and the old county fairground.
Read the guideThe smelter ground
Where the smokestacks stood
Two stacks, 455 and 295 feet, gone in one morning, and what marks the ground now.
Read the guideThe river
The Jordan River through Murray
Five miles of paved trail, five trailhead parks, a confluence and a wetland classroom.
Read the guideMoving here
A centre of the valley address
What three rail stops, two freeways and a round the clock hospital do to a week.
Read the guideThe companion
Murray, the whole picture
The park, the smelter ground, the city centre, the river and the address, in one place.
Read the pageQuick answers
The centre, answered.
It was the single zoning district covering Murray's downtown, and it has been replaced. On 25 June 2025 the Municipal Council adopted the City Center Form Based Code, which split that one zone into five form districts: Civic Center, Boulevard, Neighborhood Corridor, Residential Transition and Transit Neighborhood. The governing ordinance is 17.170, design guidelines sit alongside it, and a five member architectural review committee now reviews new construction and major alterations.
Civic Center covers the institutional heart around city hall. Boulevard covers the State Street frontage. Neighborhood Corridor covers the connecting streets that carry local business rather than through traffic. Residential Transition handles the step down from the commercial core into the historic residential grid behind it. Transit Neighborhood takes the south west corner nearest Murray Central station and is the densest of the five.
Because of what was under the stage. Crews found severe foundation failure there and had to excavate seventeen feet below ground and pour new footings, which turned a restoration originally slated to finish in early 2024 into one that reopened in the autumn of 2025 and pushed the cost past three million dollars. The building had already been dark for eight years by then. It reopened on 26 September 2025 and to the general public on 28 September.
It opened on 28 October 1938 at 4961 South State Street and is an Art Moderne house, one of the better surviving examples of that style in this part of the state, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The restoration returned the 333 seat room to its 1938 appearance while fitting it with laser projection, new production and sound systems and an orchestra pit on an elevator lift.
An 1899 house at 4872 South Poplar Street, on the National Register of Historic Places since 1983, which the City of Murray bought in 2017 to give its museum collection a permanent home. Purchase and restoration together ran between 1.5 and 2 million dollars including state grants. The Murray Museum reopened inside it on 2 May 2025, a month after Preservation Utah gave the project a Rehabilitation and Restoration Award.
Both TRAX and FrontRunner. The light rail platform sits at 5144 Cottonwood Street and is served by the Blue and Red lines; the commuter rail platform sits at 40 West Vine Street. The station opened on 4 December 1999, has one island platform and two tracks for each system, about 1,095 combined parking spaces and four bicycle lockers. Line assignments change with UTA service revisions, so check the current system map for a specific journey.
The zoning is done and two restorations are open; the new buildings are not there. Delivered so far: an adopted form based code, an architectural review committee meeting on a published schedule, the restored Murray Theater, the restored Murray Museum, and a station that has been running since 1999. Announced or merely enabled: the mixed use downtown the five districts are written to produce. Both are real, and only one of them is standing.
Part of it. The Murray Downtown Residential Historic District has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2005 and covers the residential grid behind the commercial core, with buildings spanning roughly 1870 to 1954. The Murray Theater and the Cahoon Mansion carry their own listings. That layer is one reason the new code writes a Residential Transition district as a formal step down rather than leaving the boundary to be argued case by case.
The architectural review committee's agenda, more than any masterplan drawing. Five members review new construction and major alterations in the five districts and make recommendations to the Planning Commission, on a published meeting schedule, so what actually gets proposed and approved near a specific street shows up there first. Beyond that, price what is delivered today and treat the announced downtown as upside rather than as something already paid for.
The zoning is done. The buildings are the next decade.
Murray has finished the unglamorous half of a downtown rebuild: an adopted code, a review committee, two restored public buildings and a station that has run since 1999. What comes next is a development cycle and it will land unevenly across five districts. Tell me which streets you are weighing and I will put you with a Salt Lake County partner agent who follows this council, while I take the homework and the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.