The Plat of Zion and Urban Development in Salt Lake City BY BRENDA CASE SCHEER, FAIA, FAICP Excerpted from Utah Historic Quarterly, Volume 90, No. 3 Salt Lake City has one of the most unique origin stories of any city in the United States. Not only is the story unusual and well documented, but the plan and layout of the city remain one of a kind. Any observant visitor will note the unusual width of the streets and sometimes hear the persistent myth, attributed to Brigham Young, that they were designed to be large enough to turn around a team of oxen.1 But Salt Lake City has many other unique qualities in its physical plan, which are hard to discover without research. These include its vast extent, the very large blocks, and the very large initial lots, which were driven by religious intentions as well as the model of the Plat of Zion. The origins of Salt Lake City date to 1847 with the arrival of a small band of pioneers led by Brigham Young in the Salt Lake Valley. There, in isolation from their detractors, pioneers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) laid out a beautiful city “foursquare” to the world. It was to be a righteous place to invite the “gathering” of the faithful from all over the world in the last (latter) days before the second coming of Christ.2 The geographical calling of the Latter‑day Saints had been the establishment of a place they called the “City of Zion,” a concept that was both physical and metaphysical. Zion was to be the center of a series of cities and villages organized as righteous and wholesome places where the Saints could live out the principles of their faith.3 The location in the mountain west was a spiritual compromise. Although Smith had located the City of Zion very specifically in Independence, Missouri, by divine revelation, the Saints were unable to settle there, due to the violence that frequently erupted when they encountered more traditional Christian settlers. After Smith was murdered by a mob, the Saints, then located in Illinois, determined to find a safer venue for Zion. The highly isolated territory on the western frontier became a suitable alternative to gather the faithful and organize a settlement system. The initial difficulty of reaching the location and its ecological hostility to settlement (a high desert) formed a layer of protection for the persecuted Mormons. It also required that pioneers were reliant on and bound to their community, with little support or trade with the outside world. When the earliest pioneers and their leader Brigham Young arrived at the edge of the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, they lost no time in establishing a settlement. Within days they had scouted the land for miles around and identified a place for their new city, laying out first Temple Square and then another 134 blocks in a 9 by 15 grid, oriented along the cardinal directions (Fig. 1a). The primary influence of the grid design was the “Plat of Zion” (Fig. 1b), an ideal plan for a mile-square city of 20,000 residents, drawn 14 years earlier under the supervision of Joseph Smith and intended for Missouri.4 Brenda Scheer wrote a comprehensive article on the Mormon pioneers’ planning of Salt Lake City for Utah Historic Quarterly. Because of the length of the original, the following is excerpted from the original with her permission. You can read this article by subscribing to history.utah.gov/utah-historical-quarterly. 16 REFLEXION
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