A simple white building squeezed between a looming new apartment complex on one side and a towing company on the other could be Salt Lake City’s newest addition to the National Register of Historic Places.
The unassuming structure at 712 W. South Temple, just west of Interstate 15, was once a bustling recreation and community hub for Black residents.
The Nettie Gregory Center, named for the woman who led efforts to build the space, constituted the only community center fully open to Black Salt Lake City residents when it opened in 1964.
On Thursday night, the Salt Lake City Historic Landmark Commission formally recommended the building be listed on the country’s most comprehensive list of notable properties.
“You never know what kind of history would be in an otherwise ordinary building,” commission member Alan Bennett, who lives nearby, said. “This is fantastic to have it recognized and have that history brought forward.”
The recommendation now goes to the Beehive State’s National Register Review Committee, which can vote to forward the nomination to the Keeper of the National Register. The federal keeper, Joy Beasley, would have the final say.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) A woman walks in front of a former Black, west-side community center in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. It was founded in 1964 and is being considereed for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.
A ‘crucial link’ in Utah’s history
The center is one of only a handful of buildings still in existence, like Trinity African Methodist Episcopal Church, that tell the story of Utah’s Black history, said center board member Wes Long. The blessing of the Historic Landmark Commission represents a key first step in a larger plan to recognize the people of the center.
The bigger goal for Long is to open the center as a multiuse community hub just as its namesake envisioned more than 60 years ago — again.
In the early 20th century, William Gregory fled Tennessee because of the Ku Klux Klan’s threat to his family. Nettie, whom he courted via mail back in Tennessee and eventually married, later joined him in Utah, where the couple raised four kids in Poplar Grove, then one of the few neighborhoods in Salt Lake City where Black residents could live due to the discriminatory practice of redlining.
Nettie Gregory, a teacher, noticed Utah’s capital lacked recreational spaces for Black youth and families as segregation attitudes and policies (stemming, in part, from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ policies barring Black members from full participation in the faith) meant existing centers were largely off-limits.
So, through various clubs and churches, Nettie Gregory started fundraising for the construction of a space open to all, especially Black residents. It took decades of activism and five years’ worth of donated labor from community members working evenings and weekends to build the center. The project was known as the Salt Lake Community Center, but upon its completion was named for the woman who had worked to create it after her death right before the opening.
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The center served as a vibrant, multiuse community hub, hosting weddings, NAACP Salt Lake City Branch meetings and basketball tournaments on a court since sold off to make way for the current apartment building next door. The edifice opened just as the Civil Rights Movement started to realize significant gains, like the signing of the Civil Rights Act earlier in 1964, requiring political leaders to begin including all residents in public facilities.
“It’s a very crucial link between two different phases of Salt Lake and Utah history,” said board member Long, who got involved after writing a story about the center for Salt Lake City Weekly in 2023. “Prior to the Civil Rights Movement … they had no safe place especially for their kids to go. If you’re living on the west side at that particular time, there weren’t a lot of options open to you, so it met those needs.”
As new recreation facilities opened and others opened their doors to Black Utahns and other ethnic groups in the 1970s and ′80s, the center became a nonprofit hub on the west side.
“It was this culmination of several generations prior to that and afterward it was still being used for additional purposes,” Long said. “So, it’s a very crucial reminder of, really, just a century of history that took place that is not really that far away from us.”
The NAACP stopped holding its meetings in the building in 1997 and the center closed in 2004. Pictures taken in June 2024 as a part of the National Register nomination show much of the building seems to be used for storage.
Renewing a dream
At Thursday night’s Historic Landmark Commission meeting, members shared hope the center would be listed to help make the building’s story more widely known. Commissioner Adrienne White also noted that the center would become eligible for federal tax credits that could assist in covering rehabilitation costs if it was listed.
White also drew attention to a new pilot program that seeks to place historic markers around the city. Community councils, businesses and other organizations can submit requests for markers through Feb. 28.
Long said the center’s reconstituted board wants to revitalize the historic building as a gathering place for all ages on the west side. While the nonprofit hasn’t yet formally launched a capital campaign, it hopes to raise money to improve and expand the building by adding new amenities like a technology center, a workout room and a recording studio. The board also aims to build a new basketball court and playground on the property.
Long said it’s all in pursuit of meeting the same need that Nettie Gregory once saw and still exists on the west side: a lack of safe places to play and learn for neighborhood families and kids.
