On July 28, 1847, four days after arriving in the valley of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, Brigham Young and other leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) devised a plan for the new city they would soon build. At the center would be the Temple Square, surrounded by unusually large blocks of ten acres each—660 feet wide by 660 feet long—separated by streets that were 132 feet wide, or wide enough for a horse-drawn wagon to easily make a U-turn. In other words, walking in downtown Salt Lake City is a dramatically different experience than walking in Manhattan, where the length of a block—say between 54th and 55th Street—is only 264 feet, or four-tenths the length of a Salt Lake City block.
Accordingly, Salt Lake City’s distinctive urban landscape was one of the central themes of the Historic Main Street Walking Tour, led by Lisa Michele...
University of California Press