Temple Square, and what is actually open

Ground was broken on 14 February 1853 and the cornerstone was laid that April. Truman O. Angell drew it, a man who also designed the two Brigham Young houses further along South Temple. The finished building runs to over 253,000 square feet of floor area across about 170 rooms, with walls nine feet thick at the base tapering to six at the top, and six spires. The tallest, at the center of the east end, stands 210 feet.

The first foundation nearly ended the project. It was sandstone, and during the Utah War in the late 1850s the whole thing was deliberately buried so that approaching federal troops would not find a building site worth destroying. When it was uncovered again, a good deal of the stone had cracked under its own weight and was judged unfit to carry a building of that mass. It came out and better stone went in, which is why the visible construction timeline has a hole in the middle of it.

The walls themselves are quartz monzonite rather than true granite, quarried in Little Cottonwood Canyon roughly twenty miles southeast of the block. Getting it here was the work. A team of four oxen took three to four days to bring one large block down to the temple site. Between 1860 and 1868 congregations were assigned to keep fifty to sixty wagons moving continuously, each carrying six to eight thousand pounds. When rail service reached the valley in 1869 the remaining stone travelled by rail car, and the pace of the build changed completely.

The capstone went on with an electric motor on 6 April 1892, and the angel statue was set on top the same day. Cyrus E. Dallin sculpted it: twelve and a half feet, three tons, hammered copper under twenty two carat gold leaf. Exactly one year later, on 6 April 1893, the building was dedicated across thirty one sessions running to the twenty fourth of that month. Forty years, cornerstone to dedication, to the day.

President Russell M. Nelson announced the open house on 14 February 2025. Tours run from Monday 5 April to Friday 1 October 2027, free of charge, and that six month window will be only the second time the public has been through the interior in the building's 134 year history. The first was in 1893, before the dedication. Three to five million visitors are expected across the run, which is national park scale traffic arriving into a downtown grid.

Reservations opened on 1 September 2026 at templesquare.org and in the Temple Square app, and more than a million tours were booked on the first day, with more released since. You can reserve up to six tickets at a time, and larger groups submit a separate request. Tours are timed entry and last about 60 to 75 minutes. The hours are now set: 8:40 in the morning to 8 at night every day except Sunday, when tours start at noon. Reservations are recommended for the temple tour itself but are not required for the wider celebration around it.

There is no rededication date to give, because as of 2026 none has been announced. The stated sequence is the open house, then a deep clean, then a formal rededication, and after that access returns to church members only. Anyone publishing a specific rededication date now is guessing.

If you are within driving distance of the Wasatch Front in 2027, treat this as a fixed point in the year. If you are visiting Salt Lake City for other reasons in that window, book the hotel early and expect the downtown grid to behave like a festival city for six months.

Walk to the corner of South Temple and Main Street, at the southeast corner of the square, and look down. The Great Salt Lake Base and Meridian sits there. Orson Pratt and Henry G. Sherwood ran the first survey lines of the city from that point on 3 August 1847, six days after the site was chosen. In August 1855 David H. Burr set the pink sandstone monument that fixed it as the initial point for every public land survey in the territory, and the meridian it defines sits at 111 degrees 54 minutes west of Greenwich.

Everything about navigating this valley follows from that stone. Streets are not named, they are numbered by distance from it, in every direction, at roughly a hundred to a block. A house at 1300 East 2100 South is thirteen blocks east and twenty one blocks south of this corner. Once you understand that, you can find any address in the valley without a map and estimate the walk to within a minute. The companion hub has the full arithmetic.

It is a corner most visitors cross without stopping, on their way from a train platform to a photograph. It is also the reason the largest metropolitan area in the Intermountain West is the easiest one in the country to navigate on foot, and it takes ninety seconds to look at.