Joseph Smith Memorial Building Is New Name of Former Hotel Utah

The First Presidency announced May 14 that the former Hotel Utah in downtown Salt Lake City is officially renamed the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.

The Joseph Smith Memorial Building in downtown Salt Lake City. (Photo by Jed Clark.)

After renovation, the building opened this summer as a Church office building. The building also includes such public areas as restaurants; several meeting, banquet, and reception rooms; a theater for showing a movie about the Mormon pioneers’ westward trek; and an area known as the FamilySearch^® Center with computer stations for researching genealogies. There will also be a chapel serving downtown LDS congregations. Two tenth-floor public dining facilities will be known as the Garden Restaurant and the Roof Restaurant.

One consideration in the selection of a name, Church officials said, was the fact that there are no buildings in the downtown Church headquarters complex memorializing the name of the Prophet Joseph Smith.

The Utah Building had originally been planned as the new name of the former hotel, the First Presidency said, but with the recent downtown addition of another office building, One Utah Center, two blocks to the south, it was felt that a different name would avoid any possibility of confusion.