Salt Lake City, block by block

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.

Downtown sits at about 4,300 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 real variable in winter, which is why the inversion gets 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 theaters 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 color 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.