Paths, and to a lesser extent street patterns, are essentially the backbone of the city. They’re the vital networks between important nodes, landmarks, and regions that feed the economic, social, and cultural needs of the city.
Salt Lake City’s street patterns are uniquely designed and provide the city with a special fingerprint. Salt Lake follows a carefully ordered grid pattern (planned around Temple Square) where streets run parallel and perpendicular to each other in easily navigated east-to-west and north-to-south directions (where streets are named after numbers, which makes getting completely lost more difficult). Older cities are often characterized by confusing, meandering roads and colloquial streets names with no directional meaning.
For our group walkabout, we headed downtown via TRAX to the Wells Fargo building right off of Gallivan Plaza. After ascending twenty-four floors (and feeling a slight head rush), we walked around the building until we came into an empty room with a good view of the city. What we noticed was that the streets in the commercial/banking district were wide and spread out, whereas the street systems in the residential areas higher up in the foothills were closer together. We assumed this was because there was more traffic travelling in the business/financial district than residential areas. We also noticed the difference in architecture between the older and newer buildings. The newer buildings in the business district featured straight, clean lines with lots of windows, while the older buildings such as the courthouse and capitol building were more ornate.
After we finished with the Wells Fargo building, we headed back to TRAX and ended up walking into a local bookstore to wait for the train. All sorts of decorations were laid out for Halloween, and we flipped through different books like The Three Incestuous Sisters and comic book versions of Dante’s Divine Comedy until the train came and we were on our way back to campus.
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