Ask Wednesday: How long does it take to become fluent in Salt Lake City’s street nomenclature?

It depends on who’s trying

By Morris Dean

We were in Salt Lake City, Utah, for four days recently, and though we depended on GPS to get from here to there, a particular fascination of the place was trying to master the street nomenclature. It should be very easy. The original streets were laid out by the compass, the center of town being Temple Square, the seat of church-state government and Brigham Young's homestead and many-wives household. The concept was that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' prophet, Joseph Smith. In 1831 he envisioned the "City of Zion" laid out that way. His plat called for "all streets to be 132 feet wide. These created square blocks of 10 acres measuring 660 feet on each side." [Urban Planning Library, Cornell University]

    Temple Square sits on a parcel consisting of two original 10-acre city blocks. The bordering east-west streets are North Temple & South Temple, and the bordering north-south streets State Street & West Temple. The center point of the grid is the intersection of north-south-running Main Street (the y axis) & South Temple (the x axis).
    For a sense of the straightness of the city, here's a picture I took along State Street looking south from above the State Capitol. The straightness goes on for miles.

As I said, it should be easy. In fact, a local music teacher and school orchestra director told us, "You pick it right up." But I wasn't picking it up, and neither was my wife. We found the system more the way our son did: "It takes two weeks."
    A taste of the challenge is already evident from the very name "North Temple" (for example), which from past associations suggests the north portion of a north-south-running street. But all streets named "North" run east-west and lie north of South Temple.
    Then there's the West North Temple portion of North Temple, which lies west of Main Street and the East North Temple portion to the east. This is quite logical when you cotton on to the fact that "West North" and "East North" designate the two northern quadrants of the city – even though people tend more commonly to think of the northern quadrants of a territory as "northwest" & "northeast," respectively. The problem seems to be one of interference between old and new ways of labeling. A semantic problem?

For streets outward from Temple Square, multiples of 100 prefix their names to indicate how many blocks from center they lie. East-west-running streets above North Temple are named 200 North, 300 North, 400 North, etc. Below South Temple they're named 100 South, 200 South, 300 South, etc. 100 South is the only "100" street – apparently because South Temple is considered the x axis (with North Temple replacing 100 North). On the east and west, to either side of Main Street (the y axis), north-south-running State Street and West Temple replace 100 East and 100 West, respectively. Only logical.
    For example, the address of the hotel we stayed at is 250 West 600 South – six blocks south of South Temple, in the block that starts two blocks west of Main Street. The locals (and our GPS guide's voice) say addresses fast, as though they're familiar to everyone, and it didn't take my head long to start spinning. Some more addresses:

2041 South 2100 East (a family-run diner)
1818 South 300 West (a Costco we checked out)
605 North 300 West (a cycle shop)
776 North Terminal Drive (SLC International airport)
8th Avenue & C Street (LDS Hospital)

I just threw the last two in to illustrate that Salt Lake City also has streets not named according to Joseph Smith's original plan.

Well, after four days, I thought I had the idea, and, in principle, I understood the nomenclature. But I continued to have trouble visualizing where a street address was relative to Temple Square. Maybe I needed the rest of the two weeks that our son specified. I wondered whether there was something to this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. Could our apparently family difficulty with Salt Lake City's street nomenclature be genetic?
    The school music teacher, on the other hand, had picked it right up. But, then, she had played competitive chess as a ten-year-old.

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean