Utah Street Names

Nearly every city in Utah uses the same street naming plan, patterned after a modified version of Brigham Young's original plan for laying out the streets of Salt Lake City. In this scheme, called the Lyman plan, local civil engineeer Richard Lyman, who standardized the pattern initated by Brigham Young, the streets are established in a grid pattern and numbered upward from a central point of origin. For example, in Salt Lake County, the southeast corner of Temple Square serves as the baseline for numbering. The streets are numbered according to their distance from the origin point, increasing by 100 for each block. So, the first street south of the origin is called "100 South" and the eleventh street west of the origin is called "1100 West." Not terribly imaginative, but incredibly easy for navigation -- once you understand it!

Visitors to Utah are often confounded by street signs like this. As noted in this article, streets are numbered, 100 to the block, in all directions from the origin. However, there are often smaller streets midblock, and these lesser streets are also numbered. In this photo from Provo, "550 West" is midway between 500 and 600 West and "1940 North" is between 1900 and 2000 North, but a little closer to 1900 than to 2000. See? It's easy!

The house numbers and other addresses match the numbered streets, so an address which is located at 2365 South will always be between 2300 South Street and 2400 South Street. Often people who are unfamiliar with the system get confused when they see an address like 7368 South 2000 East. Don't let it throw you. The first pair is the street address, and the second pair is the name of the street. So, in this example, the address would be located somewhere near 7300 South on the street named 2000 East.

Not confused yet? Well, let me add this wrinkle: Utahns frequently call a street by its ordinal position in number of blocks from the origin instead of using the block number. For instance, locals will refer to 5300 South as "53rd South." It is not uncommon to encounter bewildered tourists, having been told to look for "First South," who are wandering around and finding only signs that say "100 South." Some people think that the practice is just a cruel way used by Utahns to sort out the locals from the tourists!

UDOT does little to ease this confusion. On freeway exit signs, the department uses both formats equally without any consistency. One is just as likely to see "5600 West" as "56th West" (in fact, exit 113 from I-80 is labelled one way for eastbound traffic and the other for westbound traffic!) If anything, it appears that their current preference is to call the streets using the xx00 format as opposed to the xx-th format, as new signs seem to utilize xx00 consistently, but the existing exits are still a hodgepodge. On my Interstate exit lists, I am attempting to list each one using the exact wording on the exit signs. If you happen to encounter one which is different from my lists, please drop me a line.

Stylistically, when speaking if one doesn't want to use the ordinal numbers, the streets are called as multiples of 100. When faced with "5300 South", one would say "Fifty-three hundred South" and never "Five-thousand Three hundred South". The only exceptions to this are the even thousands; locals say "Seven thousand South" instead of "Seventy hundred South," but again, "Seventieth South" seems to flow much better! For numbers greater than 10,000, the most common practice is to break the number into a pair and a triplet, so that 10400 South is pronounced as "Ten - Four Hundred South" (or, again, the very easy "104th South"). When writing the numbered street names, regardless of how high the number is, never use a comma to seperate the thousands from the hundreds

In fairness the system works quite well. Once one adjusts to the odd appearance of addresses in this system, any address in the grid can be located quickly and easily. In practice, there are a couple of problems with the system. The first is that conflicting numbering systems can run together and create confusion where they meet. Back in pioneer days, each town was laid out with its own origin and set of numbers. In the rural early days of the territory this situation worked well, but as the population grew, there heretofore isolated enclaves grew together, and a street was assigned one number(name) relative to the grid and a completely different number(name) relative to the other. Such problems can be found today in Provo and Orem, and throughout Davis County.

In the state's largest county, such confusion was eliminated long ago, because Salt Lake County unified its numbering plan in 1970. For Salt Lake City itself, this meant that all of its "..West" and "..North" streets were renumbered, increasing by one block in all cases. All of the other cities in county came along with the exception of Midvale and Herriman. Midvale was forced to acquiesce in 1998 after annexing most of the land in the Fort Union area, an area which was already on the county plan.

Salt Lake City had to renumber its streets in two directions because its original grid differed slightly from the Utah plan. Its south streets and addresses were numbered South Temple Street, along the south side of Temple Square, while the North streets originated from North Temple street, on the north side of the square. Addresses between North and South Temple Streets were special cases that had no directional indicator. The East and West streets were under a similar scheme.

The county plan established South Temple as the baseline for north-south addresses, so all of Salt Lake City's north addresses were one block off, and had to be adjusted. Likewise, the county chose Main Street, the street along the east side of Temple Square which had been called "East Temple Street", as the basis for east-west addresses. The their northern counterparts, all of the city's west addresses were one block off because they had been based upon West Temple.

The second problem is that the system makes no accommodation for diagonal streets. Even streets which "drift" in one direction or another are forced to change names to reflect their current position in the grid. The street called "3300 South" as it passes under I-15 in South Salt Lake, bends southward as it crosses the Jordan River and it has become "3500 South" by the time it crosses Redwood Road.

The final problem with the system isn't really a problem with the system itself, but rather a failure of political leaders to adhere to it. Many developers, as they build a new neighborhood, want to assign names to the streets that will help in selling the house. The problem is that, even though alphanumeric street names have no place in this system, local governments and planning commissions will permit the builders to name a street something other the numeric value it should have. The result is that now the system provides absolutely no help in locating many addresses because the address no longer contains the grid components. Today, in many real estate listings, one will find a "coordinate" position along with the address to assist potential buyers in finding the house. In fact the local yellow page directory devotes several pages to a conversion chart to report coordinate locations of named streets. All of this would be unnecessary if officials had followed Brigham Young's original plan.

By the way, Ogden, Park City, Eureka, Helper, Kenilworth. and Copperton are six cities in Utah which were not laid out under this system and still do not use it. The latter five were laid out by mining and railroad interests rather than by Mormon pioneers. Bingham, a townsite in the Oquirrh Mountains of western Salt Lake County, which has since been gobbled up by Kennecott's giant open pit mine, was another mining town in Utah which did not use the Lyman plan.

On the other hand, this logical system has found its way to a few other cities outside of Utah, including many in border states which were settled by President Young's charges, such as Panaca, Nevada; Freedonia, Arizona; and many cities in Southern Idaho. The furthest-flung known implementation of the Lyman plan is found in Valparaiso, Indiana.