50 Fun Facts About Salt Lake City

When pioneers founded Salt Lake City in July 1847, the valley still officially belonged to which country?

Mexico gave up the region early the next year, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo handed the United States the land that became Utah.

Which fast-food chain's first franchise opened near Salt Lake City in 1952, selling a recipe from another state?

Kentucky Fried Chicken owes its bucket to the same Utah franchisee, Pete Harman, who introduced the cardboard tub in 1957.

Which everyday road device did Salt Lake City policeman Lester Wire build an early electric version of in 1912?

The traffic light he built was a yellow wooden box with a pitched roof, so like a birdhouse that locals nicknamed it Wire's pigeon house.

Which Disney Channel movie about a basketball captain turned singer was filmed at an actual Salt Lake City campus?

High School Musical used East High, a working public school, and by summer 2007 the building was drawing 40 to 50 fans a day.

Which 1980 American team lit the cauldron at Salt Lake City's 2002 Olympics?

Men's ice hockey heroes of the Miracle on Ice were summoned by their captain, Mike Eruzione, and the whole squad lit the flame together.

The Utah Jazz moved to Salt Lake City in 1979 from which city, the source of the team's musical name?

New Orleans kept the team for only five seasons, as arena troubles and an 11% amusement tax, the highest in the nation, pushed it west.

Which first for American women did teacher Seraph Young achieve in Salt Lake City on February 14, 1870?

Voting under equal suffrage reached Utah Territory just two days before her ballot, and Wyoming's women, enfranchised earlier, had not yet gone to the polls.

Brigham Young is said to have wanted Salt Lake City's streets wide enough for what to turn around?

An ox team and wagon needed room to swing about, the common explanation runs, so the streets were drawn 132 feet wide around square blocks of ten acres each.

Which object fell from the Angel Moroni statue atop the Salt Lake Temple during a 2020 earthquake?

A trumpet dropped from the statue on the tallest spire when a magnitude 5.7 quake, centered near Magna, shook the valley that March.

What makes the Great Salt Lake, on Salt Lake City's doorstep, far saltier than the ocean?

It has no outlet, so rivers bring minerals in and only evaporation takes water out, which is why some call it America's Dead Sea.

Which team beat the Utah Jazz in back-to-back NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998, clinching the second in Salt Lake City?

Chicago Bulls guard Michael Jordan settled the 1998 series on the Jazz's own floor, sinking a 20-foot jumper with 5.2 seconds left.

Which artificial organ was first permanently implanted in a human at Salt Lake City's University of Utah in 1982?

Heart recipient Barney Clark, a dentist the university's medical school had once turned down as a student, lived 112 days on the Jarvik-7.

Which birds are honored by a Temple Square monument in Salt Lake City for devouring crop-eating crickets in 1848?

Seagulls arrived after the settlers prayed for help, later accounts say, and the California gull went on to become Utah's state bird.

Brigham Young's Salt Lake City home is named for which emblem of industry that sits on its roof?

The beehive carved atop the 1854 house stood for hard work and cooperation, and the building was also his residence as governor of Utah Territory.

Which metal is the main product of the Bingham Canyon Mine, the vast open pit southwest of Salt Lake City?

Copper has been dug from the canyon since 1906, leaving a pit more than two miles wide and about three-quarters of a mile deep.

In which sport at Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Olympics did a judging scandal lead to a second gold medal being awarded?

Figure skating officials gave Canada's Jamie Salé and David Pelletier a second gold after a French judge said she had been pressured to favor the Russian pair.

Which dessert brand, honored by Utah's Senate in 2001, appeared on a souvenir pin at Salt Lake City's 2002 Olympics?

Jell-O won the honor after Utahns rallied to take back the per-capita eating title that Des Moines, Iowa, had snatched from them in 1999.

Which animals, ferried over by boat in 1893, roam Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake by the hundreds?

Bison numbering just twelve made the 1893 crossing, and the herd they founded, kept at 500 to 700 head, is among the oldest publicly owned ones in the country.

Which future presidential candidate was hired in 1999 to rescue Salt Lake City's scandal-hit 2002 Winter Olympics?

Mitt Romney left the private equity firm Bain Capital to take over after a bribery scandal and a budget shortfall threatened the Games.

The Great Salt Lake beside Salt Lake City is a shrunken remnant of which vast Ice Age lake?

Lake Bonneville was nearly as large as Lake Michigan until much of it burst out through Red Rock Pass in Idaho in a single cataclysmic flood.

Which NHL team's players and coaches were handed to a new Salt Lake City franchise in 2024?

Arizona Coyotes players, coaches and draft picks went to the Utah Jazz's owner in place of an expansion draft, while the old club suspended operations.

Which point guard spent his whole career in Salt Lake City and retired owning the NBA records for assists and steals?

John Stockton missed only four games in his first 13 seasons, and in 1995 he passed Magic Johnson as the league's all-time assists leader.

Which Utah Jazz forward, nicknamed the Mailman, won two NBA Most Valuable Player awards while playing in Salt Lake City?

Karl Malone took the award in 1997 and 1999, then left after 18 years with the Jazz for one final season with the Los Angeles Lakers.

From which Illinois city, abandoned in 1846, did Brigham Young's followers set out on the trail to Salt Lake City?

Nauvoo had been the Latter-day Saints' main settlement since 1839, and about 14,000 of its residents set out to find a new home in the West.

Which coast-to-coast link was completed in Salt Lake City in October 1861, making the Pony Express obsolete within days?

The telegraph line took 27,500 poles and 2,000 miles of iron wire to build, and the Pony Express officially shut down two days after it was finished.

Which winter weather pattern traps polluted air over Salt Lake City when high pressure stalls over the Great Basin?

Temperature inversion can hold thick smog in the valley for days or weeks at a time, now and then giving the area the worst air-pollution readings in the nation.

Salt Lake City holds the world's largest library devoted to which research field, open free of charge downtown?

Genealogy researchers there can draw on 1.3 million rolls of microfilmed records, the fruit of a worldwide filming effort that began in 1938.

Which Spanish word begins the name of Salt Lake's Major League Soccer club, winners of the 2009 MLS Cup?

Real means royal, a title King Alfonso XIII granted to Spanish clubs such as Madrid and Betis, and the Utah club's first owner chose it hoping for a partnership with Real Madrid.

Which baseball comedy about a boy called Smalls and a feared dog was shot in and around Salt Lake City?

The Sandlot passed Utah off as the San Fernando Valley of 1962, filming in Midvale and Ogden as well as the capital.

Which California band recorded a 1965 song titled Salt Lake City after playing a Utah amusement park year after year?

The Beach Boys played Lagoon Amusement Park at least twelve times, and Utah was among the first places outside California to air their records.

In the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, a villager from which country dreams of life in Salt Lake City?

Uganda is where the show sends its two young missionaries, and its writers researched it on a road trip to the Utah capital to interview missionaries.

Which long-running CBS drama led by Roma Downey and Della Reese was mostly produced in Salt Lake City?

Touched by an Angel ran for 211 episodes over nine seasons from 1994, with Downey as a heavenly caseworker and Reese as her sharp-tongued supervisor.

Which comedian, lead of a self-titled ABC sitcom launched in 1988, was born in Salt Lake City to a Jewish family?

Roseanne Barr found her first stage at six, lecturing at Latter-day Saint churches around Utah, and was elected president of a church youth group.

Which pink blend of ketchup and mayonnaise did Don Carlos Edwards serve at Salt Lake City's first Arctic Circle in 1950?

Fry sauce had been on the menu at his earlier barbecue restaurant since the early 1940s, and the Arctic Circle chain carried it across the West.

Which name did Salt Lake City's founders give the vast state they proposed in 1849, which Congress never recognized?

Deseret ran its own provisional government for nearly two years, until Congress carved out a much smaller Utah Territory in 1850.

Which US president sent an army toward Salt Lake City in 1857, a campaign critics later branded his Blunder?

James Buchanan ended the Utah War by offering full amnesty to settlers who accepted federal authority, after they had blocked the army's way into the valley.

A sphinx in Salt Lake City's Gilgal Sculpture Garden wears the carved face of which religious founder?

Joseph Smith's features were set on the sphinx by Thomas Child, a masonry contractor who filled his own backyard with symbolic stonework until his death in 1963.

Which big-cat hybrid was Shasta, born in 1948 at Salt Lake City's Hogle Zoo to a tigress and a male lion?

The liger made LIFE magazine in 1948, which reported that her parents had been rubbing noses through adjoining cage bars before keepers let them live together.

Which coach took over Salt Lake City's Utah Jazz in 1988 and won more than 1,000 games with that one club?

Jerry Sloan, the youngest of ten children from Gobbler's Knob, Illinois, stayed 23 seasons in Salt Lake City and took the Jazz to two NBA Finals.

Which small Utah town, named for the US president then in office, was the territorial capital before Salt Lake City?

Fillmore sat near the territory's geographic center, yet the legislature met there for only one term, in 1855, before the capital moved north.

Which Salt Lake City retailer, founded by Brigham Young in 1868, claimed to be the country's first department store?

ZCMI kept its own name until 2001, and its old façade was saved to front the Macy's in the City Creek Center.

The 1847 pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley by which route, now marked by a heritage park at its mouth?

Emigration Canyon gave tens of thousands of later arrivals their first view of their new home from the same small hill just past its mouth.

Which hill above Salt Lake City did Brigham Young and other leaders climb two days after arriving to survey the valley?

Ensign Peak was named that day as a good place to raise a banner, and from the top Young chose to build the city and its temple at the foot of the slope.

Which recently deceased senator gave his name to the army fort founded east of Salt Lake City in 1862?

Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln's old debate rival, had died in 1861, and the camp was set up by Colonel Patrick Connor's California and Nevada volunteers to guard the overland mail route.

Which Salt Lake City doctor became America's first female state senator in 1896 by defeating her own husband?

Martha Hughes Cannon went on to write Utah's sanitation laws and helped found the state's first Board of Health.

Under which nickname did Salt Lake City's ABA basketball team win the 1971 league title in its first Utah season?

The Stars arrived from Los Angeles in June 1970 and, less than a year later, edged the Colonels in seven games for the championship.

Which 1970 land artwork by Robert Smithson was built of basalt and earth at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake?

Spiral Jetty spent years fully submerged, and only a long drought in the early 2000s left it visible for the first prolonged period in its history.

Which American became the first Black athlete to win Winter Olympic gold, as a brakewoman at Salt Lake City in 2002?

Vonetta Flowers had been a college sprinter and long jumper who missed out on the Summer Games several times before she turned to the bobsled.

Which American author recounted an early visit to Salt Lake City in Roughing It, a book about going west by stagecoach?

Mark Twain made the journey with his brother Orion Clemens, who had just been appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory.

Which forerunner of the internet linked a University of Utah computer in Salt Lake City to three in California in 1969?

ARPANET used its first four nodes as a testbed for the network's earliest protocol, and the Utah machine was the only one outside California.