Historic Street Names

The streets in the Highland Park neighborhood are distinctive in Salt Lake City because they followed a pattern going west to east of naming each street after 13th East with a name that continued alphabetically. Specifically the street names were as follows:

• Alden

• Beverly

• Chadwick

• Dearborn

• Ellis

• Filmore

• Glenmare

• Hartford

• Imperial

• Jasmine

• Kenwood

• Laurel

• Marshall

• Nelden

• Oxford

• Preston

However, even before houses had been built on all of these streets (the houses were slowly built as they were purchased and were generally built from the west to the east in the neighborhood) the street name pattern was altered. 

Richard Lyman was on the Utah State Road Commission from 1908-1919. In 1918 he was made an Apostle in the Mormon church. In the 1930s he pushed a program in Salt Lake County to rename streets as part of the "Works Progress Administration." This resulted not only in changing several of the street names in the neighborhood to change to things like 1500 E, but also to change names of other streets to make them match street names from further north in the city which were at approximately the same longitudinal position (such as Nelden becoming Wellington). This effort to standardize the street names ruined the naming scheme of the neighborhood streets. 

In this current time where we can easily tell our phones where we want to go and get directions the standardized naming doesn't really help things. It would be great if we could change the street names back, or at least get special "Historic" street signs above the standard ones to preserve the character of the neighborhood design.