This is the Utah State Capitol building. It sits on the hill at the top of State Street in Salt Lake City. (I’m confused. According to the Google searches I did, the building is the capitol building, whereas the city is the capital.) According to Wikipedia, for a short time Fillmore, Utah was the Territorial capital but in 1866, before Utah gained statehood, it was moved up to Salt Lake City.
This picture was taken on February 6th this year. The grass is all dead and brown, the trees leafless, but as often happens in Utah, any snow that did fall has long melted and dried up. If I remember correctly, it was a relatively warm day, I had a light jacket on and was perfectly comfortable. Yet two days later it could have been frigid and snowing. Such is the weather here.
I was up there for a rally of State workers, fighting the Legislature’s plans to gut our retirement system. In the end they did not change the retirement for current workers, but radically cut it for future hires. And they wonder why schools always start the year with unfilled teaching positions.
6 comments:
Your English lesson today is on homophones, words that sound alike but have different spellings and different meanings. Capitol is a building. Capital is a city, a letter, or money. How to remember it: the capitol buildings in SLC and in DC have domes that are round like an O.
End of English lesson.
OMG - on my only visit to Salt Lake City, too many years ago, I took virtually this same angle of the Capitol building. That was pre-digital and pre-divorce, which are 2 reasons I do not have a copy of the photo.
Might have to borrow yours, Max! :)
Writer - Thanks for the info.
Alexia - That's kind of funny, that we'd both take the picture from the same perspective. I would expect that most tourists and visitors to the state take the picture straight from the front. Cool.
For fun I checked my copy of America's Historic Places for this building, with no luck. But I learned something very interesting about the name Utah! Listed under the Pioneer Trail State Park info describing the delightful little town, Old Deseret (A Mormon term for honeybee, Deseret was the original name for Utah.) They also mention a gilded beehive (Beehive House) atop the cupola-is the Mormon symbol of industry! A couple other places but nothing about your picture! So thanks for sharing this...Capitol Buildings and Court Houses in the center of small towns are a favorite of mine!
Karen - Fillmore, the original capital, is still a small town, but Salt Lake City has gotten pretty big these days. We don't rival NYC, LA or London, but we're not small town anymore (unfortunately). Even though the picture makes our capitol look like it's out in the middle of a field with nothing around it, it's actually surrounded by a metropolitan area of about a million people.
But I have to agree with you, one of the things I like about Utah is that there are still a lot of little towns with some beautiful old court houses and city halls in their centers. I may have to spend some time getting some pictures of them for here, eh?
Yes Max, more pictures of those quaint little towns, and maybe the Beehive house is it? Have you been there to see it?
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