Downtown Salt Lake City: Architecture, History and Culture

Salt Lake City was grown out of the desert. Large streets and grand ambitions were plotted by pioneers who’d crossed America to get here.

On this walking tour, you’ll find out how a tight-knit religious community transformed an empty valley into a sophisticated city, and see the architecture, art, and folklore they left behind.

The tour begins at the Great Salt Lake Base and Meridian, the “Point Zero” of the city. You’ll head south along Main Street, past the cast-iron facade of ZCMI – America’s first department store – and beneath the City Creek Bridge, still debated by locals as either urban masterstroke or streetlife killer. You’ll pass through City Creek Center, where a retractable roof, choreographed fountains, and a reintroduced trout stream sit alongside reassembled storefronts from the 1800s.

You’ll head along West Temple and encounter the Assembly Hall, and a surviving pioneer log cabin. I’ll point out Temple Plaza, where 91 international flags hang, and Salt Lake Temple’s reflection pond. The tour ends at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, the former Hotel Utah, which hosted every U.S. President from Taft to Reagan and still serves the city’s most famous dinner rolls.

On this 90-minute tour, you’ll have a chance to:

• Decode the Walker Center’s rooftop radio tower, which still broadcasts weather forecasts in color
• Visit the Conference Center – home to the Tabernacle Choir’s 5,000th broadcast
• Spot Karl Malone and Seraph Young – the first American woman to vote under an equal suffrage law – in two landmark murals on 100 South
• See the Amussen Jewelry Building, whose mirrors now hang inside the Salt Lake Temple
• Learn how the “Miracle of the Gulls” saved the pioneer harvest and made the California Gull Utah’s state bird
• Admire Abravanel Hall, where Dale Chihuly’s 1,000-piece glass sculpture was sold to the city on condition it remain permanently free to view
• Hear how bullet marks found on the Angel Moroni statue confirmed a long-dismissed local legend

By the end of this tour, you’ll have heard stories about Downtown Salt Lake City that are stranger, funnier, and more ambitious than you’d expect.