Travel: Winter in Salt Lake City
Understanding the layout of Salt Lake City
Now that you know where it came from, now how does that apply to modern SLC?
Two general rules apply. Most of the popular locations for things like restaurants (and ski resorts) are South and East of downtown and the 0,0 Base and Meridian point.
Trolly Square, an actual old trolly / street car depot turned into shops and restaurants is located on the corner of 6th and 6th. Yes, that’s right, ‘6th and 6th’. As a local, you immediately would understand that you would mean 600 south 600 east.
It’s also implied for simplicity you remove the last two zeros. For example:
7th East = 700 E.
13th East = 1300 E.
But it can get even more simple. As most everything in the Salt Lake Valley is located South of downtown. So you’ll find locals saying that the REI is on 33rd (3300 S) and that there’s another REI down in Sandy on 106th (10600 S). Sandy, UT is indeed a city in the Salt Lake Valley. But the addresses still use the 0,0 from the downtown Salt Lake City Base and Meridian.
This was really helpful before GPS. Now, most people don’t pay attention and don’t care about all these numbers. They just punch in the address and let their Nav take them there.
Getting your bearings around SLC (Salt Lake City)
When you say Salt Lake City, it’s a bit of a generality around the larger area called the Salt Lake Valley. The Salt Lake Valley is full of many now incorporated cities, but what can be confusing or make things really easy is that the addresses across all these cities are still based on a Salt Lake centric grid system. The Grid system in the Salt Lake Valley is based on a N-S-E-W or X - Y coordinates. These coordinates are centered at the 0,0 mark at the Mormon Temple. So much for separation of church and state. LOL 😂
Back in the day 148 Mormon pioneers came to Salt Lake Valley and dubbed “This is the place”. Their leader, Brigham Young, identified a spot on which they would work to build a Mormon temple. Known as the Base and Meridian, a small stone marker on the southeast corner of Temple Square is the epicenter of Salt Lake City’s grid system.
Brigham Young mostly believed in the ‘spirit’ of the Plat of Zion but understood that it might not be that pragmatic to adhere fully to Joseph Smith's utopian ideal. For instance, instead of building twenty-four temples (yes, they wanted to build 24 temples in the center of SLC!!!), Brigham Young started with one. Young also felt that a modern city could not rely on a home economic model, so Young planned for commercial and industrial districts.
