Salt Lake City and the Theology of the Grid

How Brigham Young built a religious statement in street form — and created the widest, most symmetrical grid in America

Most American cities are gridded. Philadelphia, Savannah, Chicago, Portland — the orthogonal street network is so common in the United States that it functions as a kind of urban default, the path of least resistance for any city that grew by survey rather than by accident. But no American city has ever committed to the grid with the intensity, the precision, or the ideological fervor of Salt Lake City.

Seen from above — or rendered as a minimal street map of Salt Lake City — the city is almost shockingly regular. Its blocks are perfect squares. Its streets are wider than those of any other major American city. Its grid extends for miles in every direction from a single origin point, aligned precisely with the cardinal compass directions. It looks less like a city that grew organically and more like a city that was stamped onto the landscape by a single act of will. Which is exactly what happened.

The Plat of Zion

The story begins not in Utah but in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833, when Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, produced a document called the “Plat of the City of Zion.” This was not a plan for a specific place — the Mormons had not yet identified their promised land — but a template for the ideal city, a universal grid that could be laid down anywhere God directed.

The Plat specified a city one mile square, divided into blocks of ten acres each, with streets 132 feet wide. Each block would contain twenty half-acre lots, each lot holding one house, set back 25 feet from the street, with gardens and orchards filling the remainder. The center of the city would be reserved for public buildings — temples, schools, storehouses. Farms would surround the city beyond its limits; no one would live on their farmland. The city was to be a compact, self-contained community of approximately 15,000 to 20,000 people, and when it reached capacity, a new city of identical design would be established nearby.

The plan was utopian in the literal sense: it described a place that did not yet exist. But it was also remarkably specific in its dimensions. The 132-foot street width was extraordinary — most American streets of the era were 60 to 80 feet wide, and many were narrower. The reason for this width has been the subject of much folklore. The most frequently cited explanation, probably apocryphal but too good not to repeat, holds that the streets were made wide enough for “a team of four oxen and a covered wagon to turn around without resorting to profanity.”

The real reasons were likely both practical and symbolic. Wide streets admitted more sunlight, facilitated irrigation (a priority in the arid West), allowed for the passage of large agricultural equipment, and physically expressed the Mormon belief in spaciousness, order, and divine generosity. A 132-foot street is not just a transportation corridor. It is a declaration of abundance.

Brigham Young Builds the Template

When Brigham Young led the Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, he carried the Plat of Zion not as a suggestion but as a commandment. Within days of arrival, surveyors began laying out the city according to Smith’s 14-year-old template. The grid was oriented to the cardinal directions. The blocks were ten acres — 660 feet on a side. The streets were 132 feet wide. The origin point was the Temple Block, the site designated for the Salt Lake Temple, which would take 40 years to build and which still occupies the city’s geographic and spiritual center.

The result, as the historian John W. Reps documented in his magisterial The Making of Urban America (1965), was one of the most disciplined acts of city-building in American history. Where other Western cities adapted their grids to topography, commerce, or the path of a railroad, Salt Lake City imposed its grid on the landscape with absolute consistency. The streets did not bend for hills. The blocks did not vary for convenience. The plan was the plan, and the land was made to conform.

Reps noted that Salt Lake City was the most faithful realization of the Plat of Zion, but it was not the only one. The Mormons built over 500 settlements across the American West between 1847 and 1900, and virtually all of them followed the same template — wide streets, square blocks, central temple lot. The result was a regional urban pattern of remarkable consistency: drive through any small town in Utah, southern Idaho, or eastern Nevada, and you are likely driving on a grid that descends directly from Joseph Smith’s 1833 drawing.

The Experience of Width

The defining experience of Salt Lake City’s grid is width. Walking across a street in downtown Salt Lake City feels different from walking across a street in any other American city. At 132 feet, the crossing distance is roughly twice that of a standard urban street. The visual proportions change dramatically: where a typical city street feels like a corridor, enclosed by buildings on both sides, a Salt Lake City street feels like a plaza rotated 90 degrees — a vast, flat expanse of asphalt and concrete that dwarfs the pedestrian.

This width has been both celebrated and criticized. Proponents point to the generous sightlines, the abundant light, the ease of traffic flow, and the ample room for the wide, tree-lined medians that have been added to many downtown streets. Critics — including generations of urban planners influenced by Jane Jacobs’s argument that narrow streets foster vitality — argue that the width kills street life. A pedestrian on one side of the street is functionally invisible to a shop on the other side. The crossing distance discourages walking. The scale is automotive, not human.

Both sides are right, and the tension between them is one of the most interesting things about Salt Lake City’s urbanism. The city has spent decades trying to reconcile its monumental grid with contemporary urban design principles, adding mid-block walkways, narrowing lanes with bike infrastructure, and creating pedestrian-scaled spaces within the oversized blocks. City Creek Center, the massive mixed-use development that opened in 2012, punched a pedestrian street through what had been a single superblock, essentially creating the fine-grained walkability that the original grid deliberately eschewed.

Grids of Faith

Salt Lake City is not the only city whose grid reflects religious conviction. The Laws of the Indies, issued by the Spanish Crown in 1573, prescribed a standardized grid plan for all colonial settlements in the Americas — a central plaza flanked by a church, government buildings, and a market, with streets extending outward in an orthogonal pattern. Hundreds of Latin American cities, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City to Lima, bear the imprint of this plan. The grid was an instrument of colonial order, but it was also an expression of Catholic cosmology — a rational, hierarchical arrangement of space emanating outward from the sacred center of the church.

The ancient Roman military camp, the castrum, followed a similar logic: a grid oriented to the cardinal directions, bisected by two main streets (the cardo and the decumanus), with the commander’s tent or the forum at the intersection. Many European cities — Turin, Florence, Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella — preserve the ghost of a Roman grid beneath their medieval accretions.

What distinguishes Salt Lake City from these precedents is the extremity of its commitment. The Roman grid was pragmatic — a fast way to lay out a temporary military camp. The Spanish colonial grid was administrative — a tool for organizing a new settlement with maximum efficiency. Salt Lake City’s grid was theological. Its dimensions were received as revelation. Its regularity was an expression of divine order. Its generosity of space was a sign of God’s favor toward his chosen people. To walk Salt Lake City’s streets is, in a very real sense, to walk inside a religious text made physical.

The Aerial View

Pull up a satellite view of Salt Lake City and zoom to an altitude of about 10,000 feet. What you see is one of the most perfectly geometric urban landscapes on earth. The grid extends north, south, east, and west from the Temple Block with almost mechanical regularity. Each block is a precise square. Each street is the same extraordinary width. The Wasatch Mountains rise abruptly to the east, and the grid runs right up to their base and stops — not tapering, not curving, just stopping, as if a ruler had been lifted from the landscape.

This is the view that makes Salt Lake City irresistible as a subject for minimal cartography. The grid is so regular, so disciplined, so free of the organic deviations that characterize most cities, that it needs almost no context to be recognizable. A few dozen parallel lines of uniform spacing and uniform width, terminated by a mountain range on one side and a lake on the other, and you know exactly where you are. The city’s identity is the grid. There is no other city in America where the urban form and the ideological content are so perfectly fused.

At streetgrid.art, a minimal rendering of Salt Lake City is one of the most striking in our collection — precisely because there is so little to strip away. The city was already minimal. It was designed, 190 years ago, as an exercise in pure geometry, and the geometry is still there, still regular, still impossibly wide, still oriented to the compass, still radiating outward from the temple at its center. Brigham Young did not know he was creating a masterpiece of minimal urban design. He thought he was building Zion. He may have been doing both.