Salt Lake City and County Building (Salt Lake City, Utah) | NRHP - National Register of Historic Places, local government, historical building, 1894_construction, Richardsonian Romanesque (architecture)

 NRHP - National Register of Historic Places, local government, historical building, 1894_construction, Richardsonian Romanesque (architecture)

451 South State Street
Salt Lake City, UT 84111

The Salt Lake City & County Building is one of Salt Lake City’s most beloved landmarks. The building is Utah’s finest example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. Numerous detailed carvings, including Indian chiefs, Spanish explorers, and the faces of the first Mormon women to arrive in the Salt Lake Valley, decorate the building’s exterior. Columbia, a female personification of the United States, crowns the clock tower.

The story of this building’s construction reveals the divisions between Salt Lake City’s Mormon and non-Mormon communities in the 19th century. In 1890, construction of a building to house city and county offices began on the corner of 100 South and State Street, just two blocks from Temple Square. The elections of 1890, however, brought to power Salt Lake City’s first non-Mormon mayor and city council. The new city administration halted construction at the north downtown site. Within a year it approved plans for the current building at the southern, non-Mormon end of downtown. During the late 1980s, Salt Lake City undertook a major renovation of the City & County Building. The building now sits on 440 base isolators which will allow the building to move as a whole during an earthquake. Workers cut the massive structure from its foundation and lifted it, in stages, onto the isolators. The City & County Building was the first building in the world to be retrofitted with base isolators.