Salt Lake City and County Building

About this property

The Salt Lake City and County Building, usually called the "City-County Building", is the seat of government for Salt Lake City, Utah. The historic landmark formerly housed offices for Salt Lake County government as well, hence the name. The building was originally constructed by freemasons between 1891 and 1894 to house offices for the city and county of Salt Lake and replace the Salt Lake City Council Hall and Salt Lake County Courthouse, both erected in the 1860s. Construction of the building was riddled with controversy. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the City and County Building was the symbol of non-Mormon citizens' open defiance of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was designed to rival the Salt Lake Temple as the city's architectural centerpiece. It is even thought that the building's clock tower and statues were designed to mimic the temple's spires and statue of the angel Moroni. Ironically, the building was originally the 1880s brainchild of the Church-backed "People's Party." When the non-Mormon "Liberal Party" was campaigning for city government, they deemed the proposed "joint building" an example of the Church's extravagance and wastefulness. In a reversal of stance, the Liberals decided to go ahead with the building when they finally gained power in 1890. Construction began in February on State Street at about 100 South. For nebulous reasons, construction was halted that November after only the foundation had been laid. The mostly non-Mormon city council questioned the buildings plans which had been completed during the People's Party reign, and wavered on how to proceed. The Deseret News complained that the Liberals were wasting taxpayer money. Ultimately, the original plans and site for the building were scrapped and the whole project was moved to the building's current location at Washington Square. The Deseret News claimed this move served the City Council, which owned property around the site and would profit from increased land values. Nonetheless, construction on new plans began by late 1891. The cornerstone was laid July 25, 1892. Mormon president Wilford Woodruff's journals reported his attendance at the building's dedication on December 28, 1894. The architectural firm of Monheim, Bird, and Proudfoot designed the Richardsonian Romanesque building (Olpin et al., 2005). Henry Monheim (a local architect since the 1870s), George Washington Bird (1854–1950; from Wichita, Kansas and William Thomas Proudfoot (1860–1928; also of Wichita) established the firm in 1891 specifically to design the building. Their firm won a building design contest against 14 other submissions. However, The Salt Lake Herald—another LDS-backed paper—claimed that the competition was a "pretentious fraud." Monheim, a Prussian immigrant, died one year into construction. Bird and Proudfoot moved to Philadelphia and Chicago respectively by 1896, so the City-County Building was their firm's only output. According to staff at the Utah State Archives, there are currently no surviving original architectural blueprints, structural drawings, engineering calculations, or detailed construction ledgers on record for the building.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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