Item Detail
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24386
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0
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0
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English
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The Changing Face of Salt Lake City
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Pioneer
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2011
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58
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no.3
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12-30
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"There was nothing haphazard about the origins of Salt Lake City. If ever there was a planned community, it was this one. The plat itself was patterned after one originated in 1833 by Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. Smith had adopted as his own the type of checkerboard grid familiar to America since William Penn laid out Philadelphia. Particularly well adapted to use in the prairie states, where the gently rolling land imposed no harsh logic of its own, the plat for the City of Zion was also suited to use in the Valley. Streets, as provided by this plat, were 8 rods wide, made to run with the cardinal directions and to cross at right angles, while the square blocks into which the land was divided were 10 acres each, exclusive of the streets. In theory, the Temple Block was the center of the city, but it could remain only the center of Plat A, for it was located so close under the rising land at the north end of the Valley as to make inevitable an asymmetrical city." [p.13]