Where the smokestacks stood, and what is on that ground now.

On the morning of 6 August 2000, by explosive charges set at their bases, so that both fell rather than toppling. The decision followed a 1998 ballot in which Murray voters were asked to approve a bond of 3.4 million dollars to preserve them and declined. Local coverage records a very large crowd and a considerable amount of feeling for two disused chimneys, and the local paper was still writing anniversary pieces about it twenty years later.

The taller of the two stood 455 feet and its companion 295 feet. The tall one was built in 1918, and not as a monument: farmers around the smelter had been complaining since at least 1907 about lead and arsenic damage to crops and livestock, and some had sued successfully, so the stack was raised to disperse the fumes higher and further away. The valley's best known landmark was, in origin, a pollution control device.

Intermountain Medical Center, the flagship hospital campus of the Intermountain Health system, which opened in 2007. The wider former industrial ground also carries a light rail station, commercial buildings, a police training facility, a school and assorted small businesses. The site was cleared for commercial redevelopment by 2002, after a cleanup that ran roughly from 1995 to 2001 and removed thousands of tons of contaminated soil.

It was proposed for the Superfund National Priorities List in 1994 with a hazard ranking score of 86.6, roughly double the regional average at the time, but the listing was never finalised. EPA and ASARCO, the responsible party, signed settlement agreements covering investigation and cleanup instead, so the work was done outside the formal listing process. Groundwater monitoring stations were installed and monitoring continues.

Three works, plus the city's own logo. A memorial garden is laid out inside the footprint of the tall stack, south of the hospital's first tower, so the outline you walk is the actual base of the 455 foot chimney. UTA commissioned a sculpture referencing the stacks at Murray Central TRAX station. And a large mural sits at the corner of State Street and 5300 South. The City of Murray also carries the stacks in its municipal logo.

Because the two things a nineteenth century smelter needed were a railway and a central position relative to the mines, and this ground had both. Works including the Germania rose along the rail line from about 1870, and ASARCO opened its lead smelter at 5200 South State in 1902. Germania survives today as a street name and as the name of a park on the Jordan River at the western edge of the city.

Operations wound down around 1949, and the tall stack's last smoke is dated to that year. What is easy to miss is how long the chimneys then stood doing nothing: fifty one years passed between the last smoke and the demolition in 2000. For half a century these were two enormous derelict brick towers that an entire valley used to orient itself, which is why the argument about keeping them was as heated as it was.

You can walk the memorial garden in the footprint of the tall stack, which sits south of the hospital's first tower, and you can see the sculpture at Murray Central TRAX station and the mural at State Street and 5300 South. Bear in mind that the ground is a working hospital campus with an emergency and trauma programme on it, so treat it accordingly: park considerately, stay on public ground, and remember that people around you are having difficult days.

It is a records question about a specific address rather than a verdict on a city, which is the same standard you would apply to a roof or a foundation. The smelter parcel itself is unusually well documented: federal investigation, a negotiated settlement, roughly six years of cleanup, soil removal and continuing groundwater monitoring. For any particular property anywhere in the mid valley, ask for what is on record for that parcel and read it, exactly as you would any other disclosure.