History
Six rooms on the first floor housed the mayor's office and other city departments. From 1866 until the completion of the Salt Lake City and County Building in 1894, the City Hall was the seat of Salt Lake City Government and meeting place for the Utah Territorial legislature. The Rose Room on the second floor served both as a general courtroom and the legislative floor.
The Assembly Hall was often the site of tension between Mormons, non-Mormons, and federal troops, but possibly the most dramatic event occurred on August, 1874. On that date, Mayor Daniel H. Wells declared martial law from the balcony of City Hall. This was in response to US Marshal arrests of several Salt Lake City police officers in concert with taking over the polls for election of a Utah representative to congress.
After 1894 the city used the Hall as police headquarters until 1915. Following this the building was used in minor capacities by the city.
To make way for a federal office building downtown, the old City Hall was relocated to Capitol Hill in 1961. The building itself and land were donated by the city and the LDS Church to the state of Utah. The LDS Church also underwrote most of the $300,000 cost for dismantling the building exterior into 325 sandstone slabs. They were numbered and reassembling around all-new woodwork on Capitol Hill. The state paid for most landscaping, furnishing, and other peripheral work at the building's current location just south of the State Capitol. Restoration was done under the direction of architect Edward O. Anderson, and was mostly finished by 1962. The building was renamed "Council Hall."
Read more about this topic: Salt Lake City Council Hall
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“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)