Salt Lake City

Streets wide enough to turn a wagon

Brigham Young looked out over this valley in July 1847, and according to tradition he said, "This is the place." The Latter-day Saint pioneers who followed him laid out a city on a strict grid centered on Temple Square, and every address in town still counts outward from it, so "500 South 200 East" is a precise coordinate rather than a street name. The blocks are huge and the streets unusually wide, supposedly so a wagon team could turn around without backing up. The Salt Lake Temple took forty years to build, from 1853 to 1893, with granite hauled from a canyon twenty miles away. In 1869 the transcontinental railroad was joined at Promontory Summit, about ninety miles north. The Great Salt Lake, the remnant of a prehistoric lake that once covered much of Utah, is saltier than the ocean and has been shrinking for decades. The 2002 Winter Olympics put the city's ski canyons on the map, and some of those slopes are less than an hour's drive from downtown.