United States · Utah · Salt Lake City
Federal Heights, Salt Lake City — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Curving streets break the Salt Lake City grid east of Virginia Street in Federal Heights, a bench subdivision of 1909 under the Wasatch Mountains.
About Federal Heights
Where to stay in Federal Heights
Each area has its own feel; here's who each one suits.
Federal Heights was platted for houses and nothing else. The Telluride Realty Company held its lots to single-family dwellings, barred business outright, and capped fences at three feet, restrictions that ran until 1927 and left a neighborhood of houses. Beds sit outside it. Downtown Salt Lake City keeps the hotel blocks downhill to the west, and the University of Utah adjoins Federal Heights along its south and east sides.
It suits you if a room near campus, and an evening walk up Federal Way past the Isaac C. and Dorothy S. Clark House, is the trade worth making.
About Federal Heights
What are the main landmarks in Federal Heights?
Landmarks in Federal Heights are private front doors rather than ticketed sites. The John C. and Mary Landenberger House went up on Virginia Street in 1914 and was the first pure Colonial Revival house raised in the subdivision. Federal Way holds the other one.
The Isaac C. and Dorothy S. Clark House of 1916 is a foursquare with Craftsman detail, one of four bungalow-type houses on that street, and it served as a fraternity house through the 1960s and 1970s. Fort Douglas, the Army reserve this ground was carved out of, lies east past the University of Utah and has been a National Historic Landmark since 1975.
What is the history of Federal Heights?
Federal Heights began as bench land nobody wanted. Slaughter yards worked the dry slope, and families building near present-day Virginia Street left it a first name, Butcherville. The Army raised Camp Douglas above the city in October 1862, during the American Civil War, and this ground lay inside its reserve.
Brick-makers dug clay from it. A water quarrel over Le Grand Young's quarry in Red Butte Canyon ended in 1906 with a trade for 42 acres of fort land, sold on to Lucien L. Nunn. Nunn's Telluride Realty Company cut the parcel into 346 building lots and filed the plat in 1909, naming it for the federal owner it was carved from.
Where is Federal Heights?
Federal Heights fills the slope east of Virginia Street and north of South Temple Street, climbing to Federal Heights Drive with the University of Utah beyond.
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Updated September 2026