There’s an old adage that those working in historic preservation are always influenced by how their involvement began.It is certainly true for me. I was sped along the path of preservation by my experiences while an undergraduate student at the University of Utah, chief among which watching a community come to grips with the future of an iconic historic building.
The Salt Lake City and County Building, which I usually heard referred to as the “City-County Building,” is a massive sandstone structure of Richardsonian Romanesque design located a few blocks south of the center of downtown Salt Lake City. Built in the last decade of the 19th century, the unique structure housed the offices of both the Salt Lake City municipal government and Salt Lake County – and was built with room to spare. In fact, the City-County Building was used as the first capitol building for the new State of Utah in 1896, and served in that role until 1915.
It is hard to exaggerate the way that the building dominates the southern part of downtown SLC, or, for that matter, measure the impact that its loss could have on the community. Nevertheless, when Salt Lake County built a sterile collection of new courthouse buildings twenty blocks south of downtown in the 1980s, Salt Lake City government officials were left with a $50 million question – should the building be preserved, or were its days of serving the community at an end? Was it simply too expensive to preserve? Making that decision all the more difficult was the need to conduct extensive seismic retrofitting – a process that would place the impossibly-heavy building on steel and rubber “shock absorbers’ that would move in case of earthquake – due to Salt Lake City’s location on the Wasatch Fault.
There was debate and more debate. During that time, I first became aware of an organization called the “Utah Heritage Foundation.” To be honest, at the time I had little to no idea what statewide preservation organizations did, or, for that matter, about the field of historic preservation itself. All I knew is that was a group that was standing up and being counted in the process. The Foundation conducted petition drives, facilitated the exchange of information, and championed the project from the start. One of the very first petition signatures of my life was to support their efforts.On the evening of the fateful final vote, I could not stay away. I attended the meeting in the Salt Lake City Council Chambers, housed in the City-County Building, and I was the person that sat directly underneath the life-sized portrait of Brigham Young that still graces that room. I was in the prime spot, therefore, to watch the Council courageously vote to tackle the massive project.
Many years later, and long after I had left Utah with my wife and newly-born son to return to Ohio for law school, I had occasion to watch the television broadcast covering the announcement of the location for the 2002 Winter Olympics. The network provided a split-screen view of each candidate community, with a crowd gathered in hopeful anticipation, poised to cheer if their city’s name was read. Imagine my great happiness when the camera showed the group from Salt Lake City, standing not before Temple Square or the Utah State Capitol, but rather in front of the Salt Lake City & County Building. Of course, it was their turn to celebrate.
There is power in the built environment, my friends, to bind communities together and to provide a powerful sense of place of Olympic proportions. I have witnessed similar stories of success in Ohio communities, large and small, as they come to an awareness of the value of their own historic resources. Those scenes and stories never fail to inspire, or to remind me of what I witnessed many years ago.
Photo: Salt Lake City & County Building -- Shawn Econo/Creative Commons License