By Lisa Ann Thomson

	Photo by Lisa Ann Thomson

Loving the Past
Salt Lake City loves its history. From restoring 150-year-old log cabins located at This Is the Place Heritage Park, to converting an old trolley garage into an upscale shopping center, to saving the crumbling city hall; Salt Lake has long placed a priority on preserving its architectural past.

Since 1976 the city has also designated entire neighborhoods as Local Historic Districts, which represent diversity of architecture in bygone eras. The city and its residents are committed to keeping these pockets of old Salt Lake vibrant and charming.

“It is important that we preserve our older neighborhoods because you can’t replicate them,” says Salt Lake City planner Elizabeth Giraud. “When they’re gone, they’re gone.”

Preserving History
South Temple was Salt Lake’s first Local Historic District. It runs along the main corridor of South Temple Street and is home to some of the city’s oldest mansions and architecture. In the 1970s developers started clearing out dilapidated old homes to build offices and apartments and the community took notice.

“As urban renewal took over and more and more buildings were lost, people caught the bug of renovating old houses,” says Giraud. “It really was a grassroots movement.”

With that momentum, a large section of South Temple was designated a Local Historic District, and more have followed. Today six areas of Salt Lake City are set apart, and in each case it was the residents who championed the effort.

“We have not designated any districts where people didn’t initially come to us,” Giraud says. “We like to feel people want them. We deal with a lot of contention and upset property owners or contractors who don’t want to go through our process. So we want people to feel like they’ve instigated it, like they’ve bought into it.”

Taking Responsibility
Living in these areas offers a certain charm, with quaint details like historic street lamps and carriage steps, but residents also carry the responsibility to preserve and sustain their neighborhoods. The process Giraud refers to is the special permit process and detailed design guidelines everyone is required to follow when they build or remodel within the districts.

Noreen Heid loved the quaintness of her 1905 house, but it had been through several updates over the years before her street was designated in the Central City Historic District. A few years ago, Noreen and her husband, Kermit, got a glimpse of what their house used to look like when Noreen came across a 1936 photo. They decided it was time to restore some of the original detail, so they began to plan for a major renovation. That meant hiring an architect who specialized in remodeling old homes, going through the involved city permit process, and spending the extra money on city-mandated upgrades, such as double-hung wood windows and wooden porch railings.

“We knew we wanted to do some renovation, and this was an extra incentive to do it right,” says Noreen. Today the Heids’ home is a model example of what doing it right can mean. They restored the original decorative shingles hung in the front gable, traded the wrought iron columns for sturdy replacements, and painted the exterior a cheery salmon color from the period.

A Moving Target
One challenge Salt Lake faces is that history is a moving target. City planners set 50 years old as the general benchmark for a building to be considered historic, so it is no longer just Tudor Revivals that fit the category. Even the modern California ranch is now moving from “outdated” to “historic,” just as the Craftsman bungalow did in recent years.

But the city has seen positive results from preserving its current Local Historic Districts and remains committed to doing all it can to continue to capture Salt Lake’s architectural past, Giraud says. “These neighborhoods are much more stable than they were 20 or 30 years ago. The preservation has provided more pride of place, a sense of neighborhood identity.”