City Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County
The capital, on a grid drawn before anybody had seen the ground
Salt Lake City, block by block.
About 199,700 people on 110 square miles, laid out in 1847 on ten acre blocks with streets wide enough to turn a wagon team, with seven creeks running out of the range behind it and most of them buried. Eleven pages on the city itself, and a clear handover to the nine county pages that own the canyons, the lake and the long river trail.
Southern Utah is my home turf. Salt Lake City 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 capital city laid out before anybody knew where the streets would go.
Salt Lake City occupies the north end of a mountain ringed valley, with the Wasatch Range standing up immediately east of the built grid and the Oquirrh Mountains closing the western side about fifteen miles away. Roughly 199,700 people lived inside the city limits at the 2020 census, on about 110 square miles that stretch from the foothills across the valley floor and out over the old lakebed to the airport and beyond it.
The thing that organises everything is the survey. Orson Pratt and Henry G. Sherwood laid the townsite out in July 1847 on a plan drawn fourteen years earlier for a city that was never built in Missouri, and the arithmetic of it is still the arithmetic of your commute. Blocks of 660 feet square, ten acres apiece. Streets 132 feet wide, including 20 foot sidewalks. Eight lots to a block at an acre and a quarter each, big enough for an orchard and a cow.
One deliberate quirk survives from that first plat and almost nobody notices it. Lots were oriented differently on alternating blocks, a basket weave laid out so that front doors did not face each other across those enormous streets. Walk any of the older central blocks and you can still read it in which way the porches point, which is a strange thing to find surviving in a city this size.
Salt Lake City at a glance
199,723
people at the 2020 census
1847
the year the grid was surveyed
660 ft
the length of one original block
132 ft
the width of the street beside it
How to read an address
Two numbers, and one corner they both count from.
Salt Lake addresses look like coordinates because they are coordinates. Once the origin makes sense, the whole valley becomes navigable without a map, and the handful of places that break the rule stop being confusing and start being interesting.
Every numbered street in the city measures its distance from one point: the southeast corner of Temple Square, where the Great Salt Lake Base and Meridian marker sits in the pavement. An address at 1300 East 2100 South is thirteen blocks east and twenty one blocks south of that corner, and because the original blocks were laid out at a uniform 660 feet, each hundred in the number is an eighth of a mile. That is why locals give directions in numbers rather than in street names, and why they can estimate a walk to within a minute or two. The Temple Square page covers the corner itself.
The system spread. Most of the valley's other cities count from their own origins, which is why the same street number appears in several places and why an address usually needs a city attached to it. Inside Salt Lake City proper, though, the grid is close to unbroken across the valley floor, and the exceptions are all worth knowing about.
The biggest exception climbs the hill north and east of downtown. The Avenues were platted separately in the 1850s on blocks a fraction of the size, with numbered avenues running east and west and lettered streets running north and south, which is why an address up there reads nothing like the rest of the city. The Avenues page has the reason and the arithmetic.
The other exception is the old part of downtown, where a handful of streets carry names rather than numbers: Main Street, State Street, West Temple, South Temple, Regent Street, Edison and Pierpont. They are all inside the first few blocks of the origin, they are all older than the numbering habit, and between them they hold most of the buildings worth stopping in front of.
| If the address says | It means | Which is roughly |
|---|---|---|
| 400 South | Four blocks south of Temple Square's corner | Half a mile from the origin |
| 900 East | Nine blocks east | A mile and an eighth east |
| 2100 South | Twenty one blocks south | Around two and a half miles |
| A Street | The Avenues, on the lettered north to south grid | Uphill, immediately northeast of downtown |
| 3rd Avenue | The Avenues, on the numbered east to west grid | Three short blocks above South Temple |
| West Temple | One of the named originals beside the founding block | A block west of Main Street |
The eighth of a mile per hundred works well on the valley floor and less well on the hill, because the Avenues blocks are shorter and the ground is climbing while you walk. Treat the arithmetic as reliable below South Temple and as a rough guide above it.
The water underneath
Seven creeks come out of the range, and most of them are in pipes.
Seven canyons open onto this side of the valley and each of them delivers a creek, named for the canyon it comes out of: City, Red Butte, Emigration, Parley's, Mill, Big Cottonwood and Little Cottonwood. Those seven are the reason the city sits where it does. The 1847 survey was drawn around City Creek specifically, because it was the water the first summer's crops were going to be irrigated with.
What happened next is the part nobody puts on a postcard. Through the early 1900s the lower miles of most of these creeks were culverted and built over, partly because the channels had become drains and partly because seasonal flooding made the ground beside them worthless. City Creek now runs about 14.6 miles with roughly two of them underground. Parley's Creek runs about 19.2 miles with roughly 8.8 of them underground. You can walk a mile of central Salt Lake City directly above running water and never know it.
The reversal has started, in small pieces. The Three Creeks Confluence project on the west side daylighted about 200 feet of Red Butte, Emigration and Parley's creeks where the three of them meet the Jordan River, turning a culvert outfall into an actual streambank with a park around it. It is a short stretch of water and a long argument about what a city does with the thing it was built on.
Two of the seven are still fully open where it matters. City Creek runs down its canyon behind the Capitol on a road that alternates between vehicles and bicycles by the day, and Red Butte Creek comes out of a canyon that has been closed to public entry for more than a century. Both of those are on the Avenues page and the Red Butte page respectively.
You can walk a mile of central Salt Lake City directly above a creek and never know it is there.
The shape of the city
Five pieces, and this companion takes them one at a time.
Salt Lake City is not one place. It is a founding block, a hill, a spine, a warehouse quarter and a long flat run out to an airport, and the pages below are organised the way the city actually divides rather than by council district.
| The piece | What is there | The page |
|---|---|---|
| The founding block | Temple Square, the grid origin, a temple shut since 2019 and an open house in 2027 | Temple Square |
| The hill | The Avenues on their own small grid, a 250 acre cemetery, the university and the bench above it | The Avenues and the east bench |
| The spine | Main Street and City Creek Center, the theatre blocks, an 1864 shop front still standing | City Creek and Main Street |
| The warehouses | Grain silos, a co-operative brewery, the murals on the Fleet Block, the 9 Line | The Granary District |
| The south side | Eighty park acres round an 1852 mill, and a park on the old prison ground | Liberty Park and Sugar House |
| The foothill | A state arboretum, a concert lawn, and a canyon behind it nobody may enter | Red Butte and the foothills |
Four more pages cut across all five: the ranked list of what to actually do, the airport four miles west, the liquor rules that surprise every newcomer, and the honest version of what winter air means for choosing a street.
What belongs to the valley
The canyons and the lake are not this city's property.
Salt Lake City sits at the north end of a county with eighteen cities in it, and the biggest attractions here are shared by all of them. Rather than write them badly from one address, this companion hands them to the county pages that cover them properly.
The canyons
The Cottonwood canyons
Four resorts on two roads out of the valley's southeast corner, shared by every city in the county.
Read the guideThe road rules
Canyon winter access
The traction law, the tread rule, the parking systems and the mornings the canyon road simply stops.
Read the guideCounty altitude
Downtown Salt Lake
The county's orientation page to the core: the arena, the theatres, the market and the airport train.
Read the guideThe lake
The Great Salt Lake
The level, the south shore, the marina and the dust, written for the whole valley rather than one city.
Read the guideFive more county subjects sit alongside those four. The Jordan River Parkway runs about 45 paved miles through eight of the county's cities. The Oquirrh side covers the western range and the mine. Family weekends ranks the valley's venues by activity and price. The valley in winter explains the inversion itself. The Bonneville Shoreline Trail takes the bench as one landform, including where it is genuinely continuous and where it is not. All nine are on the Salt Lake County hub.
If you only have one day
One version of a good day in Salt Lake City.
First thing
Start at the corner the city counts from
The southeast corner of Temple Square carries the marker every address in the valley measures itself against, and the block around it is a working restoration site.
The Temple Square pageLate morning
Walk Main Street and the creek
A recreated creek runs the length of a shopping district under a roof that opens, and the oldest commercial building in the city is two doors down the street.
The Main Street pageAfternoon
Get up onto the foothill
The state arboretum climbs the bench above the university with several miles of trail inside it, and the whole valley opens up behind you as you go.
The Red Butte pageEvening
Eat, then find out how the rules work
Utah runs a state controlled system with pour limits written into the code, and knowing which door you are walking through saves the confusion at the bar.
The nightlife pageThe Salt Lake City companion
Eleven pages, and not one of them borrows the county's scenery.
Everything The Local has written about Salt Lake City itself: the ranked list, the founding block, the hill with its own grid, the commercial spine, the warehouse quarter, the two big south side parks, the foothill garden, the rebuilt airport, the drinking rules, and the honest version of what the winter air means for choosing a street.
Things to do
The top 12, ranked
ReadThe founding block
Temple Square
ReadThe high ground
The Avenues and the east bench
ReadThe spine
City Creek and Main Street
ReadThe warehouses
The Granary District
ReadThe south side
Liberty Park and Sugar House
ReadThe garden
Red Butte and the foothills
ReadThe New SLC
The airport
ReadAfter dark
Nightlife and the liquor rules
ReadMoving here
Living with the inversion
ReadQuick answers
Salt Lake City, answered.
On a grid surveyed in July 1847 by Orson Pratt and Henry G. Sherwood, using blocks of 660 feet square covering ten acres each, streets 132 feet wide including 20 foot sidewalks, and eight lots to a block at an acre and a quarter apiece. Lots were oriented differently on alternating blocks so that houses did not face each other across the street. Every numbered street still measures its distance from the southeast corner of Temple Square.
Because they were platted separately in the 1850s, on blocks a fraction of the size of the original ten acre squares, for houses rather than for farm lots. The result is numbered avenues running east and west, lettered streets running north and south, and a walking scale that has nothing in common with the enormous blocks below South Temple. It is the one part of the city where the standard address arithmetic stops working cleanly.
City, Red Butte, Emigration, Parley's, Mill, Big Cottonwood and Little Cottonwood, each named for the canyon it comes out of. Most of their lower miles were culverted through the early 1900s. City Creek runs about 14.6 miles with roughly two of them buried, and Parley's runs about 19.2 miles with roughly 8.8 buried. The Three Creeks Confluence project has daylighted about 200 feet of three of them near the Jordan River.
The city's average elevation is about 4,327 feet, and the airport out on the old lakebed is surveyed at 4,227 feet, which puts it among the lower ground inside the city limits. From there it climbs eastward: the benches start near 4,500 feet and the foothill trails above Research Park top out just under 6,000. That spread is scenery in summer and a genuine variable in winter, which is why this companion gives it a page of its own.
A good deal, if you stay in the northern half of the grid. Three light rail lines converge downtown and one of them runs to the airport terminal, the founding block and the main shopping district are a single crossing apart, the central library and two of the theatres are within a few blocks, and the foothill trailheads above the Avenues are reachable on foot from the upper streets. Anything in the canyons or across the valley still assumes a vehicle or a bus.
September and early October are the strongest all round weeks: warm days, cold nights, the canyons turning colour and none of the winter air question. May and early June run a close second once the snowmelt is through. Deep winter is superb if you came for snow and honest work if you did not, and July and August are hot on the valley floor, which is exactly when the elevation behind the city earns its keep.
It is unusually good, and the county page rather than this one has the detail. Four resorts sit in the two Cottonwood canyons at the valley's southeast corner, close enough that people commute to them from city addresses, and the whole subject including the winter road rules belongs to the Salt Lake County pages because eight or nine cities share that access equally. Start with the Cottonwood canyons page and the canyon winter access page.
More than most visitors expect. The Utah State Capitol is open seven days a week with free guided tours on the hour from 10:00 to 3:00 Monday to Friday. Gilgal Sculpture Garden, half an acre of visionary stonework behind a row of houses on 500 South, costs nothing. The city library's terraces, the grounds at Temple Square, Liberty Park, the foothill trails and the Jordan River path are all free, and two of the big paid venues run free admission days each month.
About 110 square miles, which is large for its population of roughly 199,700 at the 2020 census, because the city boundary runs a long way west across the old lakebed. That is why the international airport is inside the city limits about four miles from downtown, and why the built residential grid is only part of what the map calls Salt Lake City. The dense part of the city is a fraction of the acreage.
Eleven pages on the city, and nine more on the valley around it.
A visit asks which block to start on. A move asks a different question: which side of the valley, how high up the bench, and how much of the winter you want to spend above the haze rather than in it. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with a Salt Lake County partner agent who works the specific side of town you are looking at, and stay on the file for 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.