Temple Square

Salt Lake City's street grid is counted outward in blocks north, south, east and west, and the point it is counted from is this ten acre square, set aside within days of the first company's arrival in July 1847. Temple Square remains the administrative and symbolic center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and it draws several million visitors a year, more than any other destination in Utah.

The square holds the Salt Lake Temple itself, closed to the public and to members without a current temple recommend, standing behind walls anyone may walk up to but not through. Around it stand buildings anyone may enter freely: the Tabernacle, an oval domed hall completed in 1867 known for its acoustics and home to the Tabernacle Choir; the Assembly Hall of 1882; two visitors centers; and, on the neighboring blocks, the Church History Museum, the Family History Library and the church's principal administrative offices.

Guided tours of the open grounds are given, without charge, by young women serving missions there, and the arrangement makes Temple Square one of the more visible instances anywhere of a faith drawing its inner life and its public face in the same small space: a granite building nobody but members may enter, standing at the center of gardens that anyone at all may walk through.

Brigham Young is said to have identified the site for the temple within four days of arriving in the valley, walking the ground before most of the company had finished making camp. Ground was not broken until 1853, and what followed was forty years of construction: granite quarried in Little Cottonwood Canyon, some twenty miles distant, hauled first by ox team and later by a purpose built railway spur, cut and fitted by masons working through Utah winters.

Work was interrupted in 1857, when news of an approaching federal army reached the valley and the foundations, already laid, were deliberately buried to keep them from view until the crisis passed. The temple was finally dedicated in 1893, four decades after the groundbreaking. The Tabernacle, completed more quickly in 1867, carries its own feat of engineering in an elliptical lattice roof built largely without nails, which were scarce and costly in the territory at the time.

The square has kept changing since. Its perimeter wall, built early in the settlement's history, survives in part today, and the whole complex underwent a major seismic renovation announced in 2019, still under way, which has included underpinning the temple itself with a base isolation system and rebuilding much of the surrounding landscaping from the ground up.