Salt Lake City, Utah

Salt Lake City is the capital of Utah and the largest city located within the vast Intermountain West region of the United States. Originally founded by religious pilgrims, the city remains the international headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), commonly known as the Mormon Church. Although the capital's population has grown increasingly diverse since the turn of the twenty-first century, the Mormon Church continues to exert a strong influence on the city's civic and political cultures.

Landscape

Salt Lake City is located in Utah's north-central region. The city lies nestled in a high-altitude valley between mountain ranges. To the east is the Wasatch Range, a part of the Rocky Mountains that runs from southeastern Idaho through southwestern Utah, and to the southwest are the Oquirrh Mountains. The city is bisected by the Jordan River.

Salt Lake City is laid out in an orderly grid pattern, with wide thoroughfares radiating from a central square. The capital's relatively modern design, created by Mormon settlers in 1847, has largely prevented the development of cramped and congested conditions common in older American urban centers. The capital proper occupies a modest area of just over 111 square miles. The greater metropolitan area, however, sprawls over some 1,618 square miles.

Salt Lake City is situated about fifteen miles southeast of the Great Salt Lake. The lake's high level of salinity, which ranges between 10 and 25 percent, makes it the second saltiest body of water in the world, after the Dead Sea. The high salt content also prevents the lake from ever freezing. This enormous body of water, which covers an average of around 1,700 square miles, has a moderating effect on Salt Lake City's climate.

Salt Lake City has a dry climate, receiving an average of 15.6 inches of precipitation per year. The city relies heavily on runoff from the Wasatch Range for its water needs. July is the hottest month, with an average high temperature of 92 degrees Fahrenheit. January is the coldest month, with an average minimum temperature of 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Climate change is a major concern in Salt Lake City. If temperatures continue to rise there, the Great Salt Lake may dry up in about five years. The lake contains carcinogens such as arsenic and mercury. If the lake dries up, these carcinogens may travel in the wind, putting human lives in danger.

People

Salt Lake City is Utah's largest city, with an estimated population of 204,657 in 2022, according to the US Census Bureau. During this year, approximately 65.2 percent of the population was White. Hispanics or Latinos of any race accounted for 19.9 percent, Asians for 5.4 percent, Black or African Americans for 3.0 percent, and native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders for 1.2 percent.

Although Salt Lake City is the home of the international headquarters of the LDS Church, the percentage of the capital's population who are Mormons—and the percentage of Utah's population at large—has experienced a slow but steady decline since the early 1990s. Driven by an influx of Mexican immigrants and people from California, the population is increasingly becoming more diverse. Experts predict that, if current trends continue, Mormons will no longer represent a majority by 2030. However, despite the drop, the influence of the Mormon religion on Salt Lake City's political and civic culture remains powerful.

While Salt Lake City is considered one of America's more affluent cities, it has experienced a surge in the number of residents living below the poverty line since the turn of the twenty-first century. In 2022, 14.1 percent of the city's residents fell into this category. Experts attribute this spike in poverty to an increasing immigrant population. According to some experts, many of the foreign-born residents who have settled in Salt Lake City since 2000 lack the education and English-language skills to obtain lucrative employment.

Economy

Up until the 1980s, Salt Lake City's economy revolved primarily around the mining industry. While the extraction of copper, silver, lead, zinc, coal, and iron ore from mining operations located in the vicinity of the capital remains an important industry, it is no longer a dominant component of the economy. Facing a downturn in profitability driven by foreign mining competition, city officials focused on diversifying the capital's economy during the 1980s and 1990s.

Salt Lake City is a key center of commercial and industrial activity in both Utah and the Intermountain West, which consists of large swaths of Utah, most of Nevada, portions of southern Idaho, southeastern Oregon, the Arizona strip, and California. Its revitalized manufacturing base turns out biomedical products, petroleum products, electronics, and missiles. Salt Lake City is also a regional center for banking and finance.

Major components of Salt Lake City's economy include the Mormon Church, the federal and state governments, finance, construction, education, high-technology industries, transportation, recreation, and tourism. In 2023, the Salt Lake City area's largest employers were in trade, transportation, and utilities; professional and business services; government; education and health services, and leisure and hospitality according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Salt Lake City area had an unemployment rate of 2.5 percent. The city was also becoming increasingly entrepreneurial, with greater numbers of start-up companies launching and established companies, including in the technology sector, relocating to the city to take advantage of local talent.

Salt Lake City's hosting of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games spurred significant improvements to the capital's infrastructure. The most significant of these improvements was the completion of a 15.8-mile light-rail transit line known as TRAX connecting downtown Salt Lake City to the center of Salt Lake Valley. Prior to the start of the Olympics, planners added a 2.3-mile east-west line connecting the downtown with the University of Utah. TRAX has since been further expanded, spanning 42.5 miles by 2019.

Landmarks

To many, Salt Lake City is largely associated with Mormonism, a characteristic reflected in the city's most prominent and noteworthy landmarks. The city's Mormon Temple, located in Temple Square at the heart of the capital, is perhaps the most famous of these landmarks. Construction on the temple began in 1853 and did not conclude until 1893. Its Gothic-inspired exterior is noted for its six tall spires and statue of the angel Moroni. The temple's ornate interior features hand-painted murals rich in Mormon symbolism.

On the same block as the Mormon Temple sits the Salt Lake Tabernacle, home to the internationally acclaimed Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Completed in 1875, the building features a dome-shaped ceiling that allows for some of the finest acoustics in any international performance venue. The Tabernacle's powerful organ contains 11,623 pipes.

Another popular Mormon landmark in Salt Lake City is the Beehive House. Built in 1854, it served as the home to Brigham Young during his time as president of the LDS Church and governor of the Utah Territory. A representation of a beehive, Utah's state symbol representing industriousness, sits atop the house.

An important non-Mormon religious landmark in Salt Lake City is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Madeleine. Completed in 1909, it is the only American cathedral under the patronage of Saint Mary Magdalene and serves as the mother church of Utah's Roman Catholic community. The building features a Romanesque exterior, complete with gargoyle statues. The church's interior, inspired largely by the late Gothic style of medieval Spain, contains elaborate murals.

The historic Salt Lake City and County Building was designed by the firm Proudfoot, Bird & Monheim in a Richardsonian Romanesque style, named for nineteenth-century architect Henry Hobson Richardson, the leading American architect of his era. The monumental building, with its five-foot-thick walls, arched entryways, and imposing towers, is constructed of sandstone, granite, slate, and onyx quarried primarily from sites around Utah. Formally dedicated in 1894, the building originally housed both city and county government offices. When Utah became the forty-fifth state admitted to the Union in 1896, the building served as Utah's legislative meeting place until the current state capitol building was completed in 1916.

The Utah State Capitol, a Renaissance-style building made of granite, sits on a hill overlooking downtown Salt Lake City. The front steps of the building offer a panoramic view of the surrounding Wasatch and Oquirrh Mountains. The building's dome is covered in Utah-mined copper, and its interior is supported by some fifty-two marble columns. The capitol's center is dominated by a 165-foot-tall rotunda featuring Depression-era paintings depicting scenes from Utah's pioneer history. The rotunda also contains a statue of Brigham Young.

Salt Lake City is home to a number of museums. These include the LDS Museum of Church History and Art, which illustrates the history of Mormonism from 1830 to the present; the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Utah Museum of Natural History, both of which are affiliated with the University of Utah; Fort Douglas Military Museum, located on the grounds of the University of Utah; the Pioneer Memorial Museum; and Old Deseret Village, a restored and re-created living community memorializing Utah's pioneer legacy.

Outdoor landmarks in Salt Lake City include the Hogle Zoological Gardens, located east of the city, as well as several parks. Liberty Park, the oldest park in the city, includes the Brigham Young Grist Mill as well as a folk-art museum. Jordan River State Park is known for its International Peace Gardens. One of Salt Lake City's most popular landmarks is Red Butte Garden and Arboretum, which is part of the University of Utah. It features more than a hundred acres of gardens, walking paths, and hiking trails.

History

The site of present-day Salt Lake City was home to various American Indian tribes. The indigenous inhabitants of the Great Salt Lake Valley included the Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute peoples. Although European explorers had reached the Great Salt Lake region around the time of the American Revolution, the area remained occupied exclusively by these tribes for another century.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a band of Mormon pioneers became the first nonnative permanent settlers in the area. Led by Brigham Young, the group of 148 pioneers founded Salt Lake City on July 24, 1847. They had been seeking a place where they could worship free of the persecution they had encountered in the eastern United States.

Young and his followers originally called their new settlement Great Salt Lake City, after the enormous, salty inland body of water located nearby. They made Temple Square the nucleus of their city and surrounded it with a grid of broad avenues, all of identical width. Six years after their initial arrival, the settlers broke ground on the Mormon Temple; the construction process would last for nearly four decades.

In 1850, the US government created the Utah Territory and named Great Salt Lake City as its capital; the "Great" was officially dropped from the name in 1868. For two decades, Salt Lake City thrived in a state of largely self-imposed isolation. Despite the California gold rush, which turned the city into a popular way station for fortune seekers headed west, and the outbreak of the Civil War, which saw the arrival of American troops, the city remained largely an enclave of the Mormon faithful.

The completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 ushered in a new era of development and expansion for Salt Lake City. One year later, the completion of a rail connection between the new transcontinental railroad and Salt Lake City made possible the city's emergence as an important mining center. The opening of numerous copper, silver, gold, and lead mines was quickly followed by the establishment of smelting operations. The mining industry would dominate Salt Lake City's economy until the late twentieth century.

In 1896, when Utah was admitted as the forty-fifth state in the Union, Salt Lake City was chosen as its state capital. By that time, the city had been the epicenter of a nearly five-decades-long campaign for statehood. Mormon leaders had repeatedly petitioned Congress for admission to the Union but had been rejected five times because of the Mormon Church's embrace of polygamy, which had been outlawed by the US government in 1862. It was only in 1890 that the Mormon Church formally rejected polygamy, paving the way for statehood six years later.

The early twentieth century saw a construction boom that produced many of Salt Lake City's historic landmark buildings. Fueled by mining wealth, the city's rapid growth was matched by a tripling of its population between 1900 and 1930. The outbreak of World War II sharply increased the demand for metal, leading to a postwar industrial boom.

The latter part of the twentieth century saw the large-scale development of suburban communities around Salt Lake City, during which time the population of Salt Lake City's greater metropolitan area experienced one of the most rapid growth rates in the United States. Salt Lake City translated its growing economic clout into a successful bid to host the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Despite a scandal surrounding the bid, the 2002 Olympic Games were widely regarded as among the most successful in history, helping to increase the city's visibility and prestige. In 2018, Utah's first Amazon fulfillment center was opened in Salt Lake City, further proving the level of economic investment continuing in the city.

Bibliography

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