Temple Square & Downtown Walk

Welcome to Salt Lake City, and to the Salt Lake Temple, centerpiece of the 10-acre Temple Square, a temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On July 28, 1847, just four days after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, church president Brigham Young marked this spot between two forks of City Creek, saying, Here will be the Temple of our God. Young laid the cornerstone on April 6, 1853. The architect was Truman O.

Angell. Building it took 40 years. During the Utah War, the foundation was buried and the lot disguised as a plowed field. The walls are quartz monzonite from Little Cottonwood Canyon, 20 miles away.

Oxen hauled the stone at first, until the Transcontinental Railroad arrived in 1869. The temple was dedicated on April 6, 1893, exactly 40 years after the cornerstone was laid. At the east end, the center spire rises 210 feet to the base of the angel Moroni. The temple closed in 2019 for a seismic retrofit, with public open house tours planned for 2027.

This is the Salt Lake Tabernacle, built to house meetings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The structure went up between 1864 and 1867, and in 1892 it was the largest assembly hall in the United States. It's famous for its acoustics, its organ and the Tabernacle Choir. Brigham Young wanted a roof with no pillars blocking anyone's view.

He asked the civil engineer Henry Grow how large a roof he could build with the lattice design he'd used on a bridge. Grow said it could be 100 feet wide and as long as wanted. In the end, the roof is 150 feet across, 250 feet long and 80 feet high. Skeptics insisted it would collapse once the scaffolding came down.

The roof structure is nine feet thick, a lattice of timbers pinned with wooden pegs. Green rawhide was wrapped around the timbers, which tightened as it dried. The original organ, built in 1867, had 700 pipes. Rebuilt several times, it now has 11,623, making it one of the largest pipe organs in the world.