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Stop 15 of 36 · Salt Lake City audio walking tour

ZCMI Cast Iron Front

Downtown Salt Lake City · 1876 · 19th-Century Cast-Iron Front

What you'll hear here: about 90 seconds on what happened at ZCMI Cast Iron Front and around Downtown Salt Lake City — the audio starts on its own when you walk into range.

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Cast iron and stamped sheet metal, worked between 1876 and 1901, form the ZCMI Cast Iron Front now facing Main Street. Look closely: this face was fashioned of cast iron and stamped sheet metal between 1876 and 1901, with portions carefully recreated in the 1970s, and it survives as a well-preserved example of a metal façade and a reminder of the city’s 19th-century commercial past. It earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.

Originally it dressed the Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution building; when that structure was razed in the 1970s the façade was removed, restored, and attached to the ZCMI Center Mall, and in the 2010s it was moved again to this City Creek Center setting. Architectural details reward a slow look: three stories tall, divided into three sections by square columns at the ends and between them; each section roughly fifty feet wide and made of seven bays separated by paneled columns topped with Corinthian capitals. Modillioned cornices mark the floors, with a deeper projecting cornice at the roofline.

Seven bays to a section, three sections across, that rhythm has held through two moves since the 1970s.

Where it is

Coordinates
40.76868, -111.89086
Area
Downtown Salt Lake City
Era
1876 · 19th-Century Cast-Iron Front

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Three stops free. No account needed. The audio plays itself as you walk.