More on Salt Lake City

Yesterday we drove down to the center of the city to Temple Square and caught a trolley tour of the city. You learn interesting facts on a narrated tour and one that impressed me was the similarity of how technology has affected business thru the ages. Salt Lake City was an important location for the Pony Express but the arrival of the telegraph put them out of business. With the telegraph you could send a message from New Your to San Francisco in a matter of hours compared to ten days with the Pony Express. One can easily see the comparison between the Post Office and the Internet.

My friends and family know that I like an ordered world where things are perpendicular and parallel. Not only is Salt Lake City clean and attractive, all the streets run south/north or east/west.The streets are on a grid system and each city block is exactly ten acres. Temple Square is city center with the street numbers increasing in size as the streets progress away from Temple Square. Each block increases numerically in 100 increments so the fourth block away from city center has numbers in the 400 hundreds. Eight city blocks equals 1 mile. It seems that Brigham Young and the early Mormon settlers were well organized and creative. In addition to the symmetrical street layout the streets were 200 feet wide to allow for a four horse drawn covered wagon to turn around. The wide streets proved advantageous when the electric train system was installed. The city trains run in the center of the street and share the traffic lights at intersections with the automobiles. Salt Lake City also has city buses and the public transportation system is free city wide.

We also learned that Brigham Young was the creator of the department store concept. It seems he thought the women were spending to much time shopping and decided to bring all the various markets under one roof. This area of Utah is rich with silver, copper, gold and other minerals and led to great wealth in the area due to mining. The largest copper mine in the world is here. Today Salt Lake City is a diversified community with Catholic and Protestant churches because the Mormons discouraged their people from participating in the mining. Thus it was necessary to import workers to work in the mines.

Lots of flowers downtown

The temple at Temple Square

 Here we are in front of the old Union Pacific Train Station. It may look familiar because it was copied by Walt Disney himself.

Union Pacific Train Station

After the tour we went back to Temple Square for the daily organ recital in the Tabernacle. This is one of four organs in Temple Square and this one is said to be the most precision tuned organ in the world.

Organ in the Tabernacle