The Plat of Zion: A Dead Prophet's Blueprint Becomes a City
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
Stand anywhere in downtown Salt Lake City and look down any block. The streets are wide enough to turn a team of oxen, which is not quite why they were built that way. They are one hundred thirty-two feet wide because a man named Joseph Smith drew a city plan in eighteen thirty-three in Kirtland, Ohio, and called it the Plat of Zion, and said the streets of the holy city should be eight rods across.
Smith intended the Plat for a city in Missouri that was never built. When Brigham Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in eighteen forty-seven, he adapted it. He kept the cardinal-direction grid. He kept the enormous blocks, six hundred sixty feet on each side. He adjusted the building placement and abandoned the plan for twenty-four temples in favor of one. But the street widths remain, in the twenty-first century, a physical argument from a theological document drawn nearly two hundred years ago.
The grid follows the cardinal directions. Every address in the city radiates outward from Temple Square, the block Brigham Young stood on within days of the advance party's arrival and said: here. The numbering system that results, with street addresses that tell you how many blocks you are from the temple, encodes the assumption that the temple is the center of the world. In Salt Lake City, by the original design, it is.
