Fifty-five men milled about the Knutsford Hotel dining room. Utah Governor Heber M. Wells had called the meeting. Days earlier the top 100 business leaders in Salt Lake City—dubbed by the 43-year-old governor as the “Committee of 100”—had been summoned. It was November 11, 1901. Gas lights could be seen flickering through the windows of [...]
When Salt Lake business leaders organized the Commercial Club in 1902, theirs was still a world largely more pioneer than progressive. When it rained and snowed, the streets of a growing Salt Lake City turned to mud as horses, buggies, and wagons traversed them. Despite the mud, a growing skyline of commercial buildings was changing [...]
On January 12, 1914, the Commercial Club’s Good Roads Committee presented a letter for the city commission about yet another civic improvement. “State Street is the main thoroughfare coming into Salt Lake City from the south and it is of the utmost importance, not only to Salt Lake, but all the different towns south of [...]
Smog, a combination of coal-fed smoke and fog, creates a London-like scene in the city in 1942. The City-County building is in the distance. Smoke pollution was a big problem during almost the entire first half of the Twentieth Century, but in the wintertime in Salt Lake City it was fierce. Everyone burned [...]
That apocalyptic headline shouted the news to Salt Lake City residents on the morning of April 18, 1906, after an earthquake and fire nearly destroyed San Francisco. Considered one of the worst disasters ever to hit an American city, the Great San Francisco Earthquake was huge news in Salt Lake City. It also became a [...]
A large crowd of people gathers to see the cornerstone laying for the new Commercial Club building on July 5, 1909. When it opened in 1909, the Commercial Club building was heralded as a sign of community progress and a harbinger of growth for what would become the Salt Lake Chamber. Early Commercial [...]
In 1914, Salt Lake City was being prodded by women’s and civic organizations to increase its parks and playgrounds. It had just leased land from the Free Playground Society for a playground and had improved Liberty and Pioneer parks. So it was in that spirit that the Commercial Club’s Field Sports and Athletics Committee, chaired [...]
The Rotary Club of Salt Lake had its beginnings in January 1911, a little more than five years after the first Rotary Club was organized in Chicago in 1905. But it took a bold move by the Commercial Club to bring it about. The Salt Lake Rotary Club grew out of a conversation in Chicago [...]
It was an unlikely winter day for a “red-letter” event in Utah history. It was January 30, 1910, and Salt Lake’s snowy weather had hampered a much-hyped aerial exhibit a day earlier. On a Sunday morning, a scrawny Frenchman named Louis Paulhan crawled into his 42-foot Farman two-seater biplane for a fourth try at the [...]
Ben F. Redman was a short and stocky Salt Lake businessman who resembled somebody’s grandfather, and he had a passion. He was convinced that the new field of aviation held great promise, not only for the country, but also for Salt Lake City. Ben Redman and J.A. Tomlinson pose in front of the Douglas [...]
