Plat A allocated three blocks as open spaces, subsequently developed as West High School, Pioneer Park and Washington Square, the location of the city and county building. These may have been inspired by the squares in William Penn’s plan of Philadelphia, which was an important influence on town planning in the United States. In addition to the unusually large dimensions of the blocks and the lots, another remarkable characteristic of the plan is the orientation of the lots. Similar to the original Plat of Zion, the lots were oriented in different directions on every block, creating a basket weave pattern. The intention was privacy for the inhabitants, so that instead of houses facing each other across the street they would face their side yards, presumably planted in garden, providing a green aspect.8 After the initial 135 blocks were laid off and distributed, rapid immigration caused two more large plats — Plat B (1848, 64 blocks) and Plat C (1849, 85 blocks) — to be developed in the same pattern.9 In addition to town lots, large agricultural lots (the “Big Field”) were laid out to the south and west, fulfilling the notion of the agricultural village. Salt Lake City’s big fields consisted of five-acre allotments within a large 40-acre block. To the south, it was located between 900 South and 2100 South in present-day Salt Lake City. Figure 3 is a map showing the first three plats and the Big Field to the south, as they existed in about 1855. The initial street plan of the Big Field is reflected in the present-day location of through streets in the Sugar House and Liberty Wells neighborhoods. The Salt Lake City plat lost cohesion from the very beginning. Instead of small houses on large lots surrounded by orchards and barns, the center of the city became urban within a few years, with small lots and multi-story buildings. Certain other plan adaptations began to Figure 3. Plat A, B, and C and the “Big Field” of Salt Lake City, ca. 1850. Meridian and Base Line of the Public Land Survey are highlighted (South Temple and Main Streets). In the evolution of the Big Field (now Sugarhouse and Liberty Wells), the through streets still respond to the pattern of the initial plat, with odd number streets as the only north–south streets, and streets every four blocks (Ninth, Thirteenth, etc.) as the only east– west through streets take shape here that would be constant in all the Mormon blocks, although the areas outside downtown were not as dense. It was necessary from the very beginning to adapt the eight-lot block configuration, because the rapid growth of the city required far more house lots than originally planned. In the 1870s the church’s grip on the city’s development was weakened with the influx of new arrivals brought by the transcontinental railroad and mining and commercial opportunities.10 At the same time, the emigration of religious settlers began to wane as church leaders downplayed the “gathering.” Consequently, the city began to accommodate its layout to new peoples and urban uses. By 1889, there was adaptation in all but a few of the Plat B blocks — the subdivision of the outside four lots into many smaller lots, defeating the intended opposite orientation in the original design. These new smaller lots were far closer to standard city lots of the era, although still developed as single-family homes, not the urban rowhouses common for U.S. cities. The lots subdivided in this manner had greatly varying widths and sizes with new houses built in different styles after the lot was divided off by its owner. Despite regulation, uniform setbacks were not observed. This left much unusable land for urban development in the inside of a block. In subsequent decades, beginning no later than 1911, this problem was handily solved by creating what could be termed “mews” — short dead-end streets with small houses on either side, all within a single original lot. There are many examples of these alleys or mews in the historic plats of Salt Lake City, almost all of them surviving into the late 20th century and many still extant. In the 20th century, the automobile began to dominate urban form everywhere. In the Mormon blocks, surface parking areas were often created in the center of the blocks. About the same time, some older houses were destroyed to make way for larger, non‑residential uses and apartment blocks, also using the vast interior of the block as parking. Scattered retail strip centers also replaced houses. Many of the smaller, less well-built houses on mews 18 REFLEXION
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