Holy Trinity Cathedral in downtown Salt Lake City is preparing to be stripped down to its bare brick for a multi-million-dollar seismic overhaul, more than five years after the magnitude 5.7 Magna earthquake tore nearly 1,500 feet of cracks through its interior walls. The historic Byzantine Revival landmark, which has stood at the corner of 300 South and 300 West for more than a century, was found to be structurally sound overall, but the damage was severe enough to trigger a full seismic upgrade of the entire building.
The March 18, 2020, earthquake damaged multiple buildings in and around Salt Lake City, part of a broader disaster that struck nearly 150 historic structures statewide and caused more than $600 million in building-related economic losses, largely to older unreinforced masonry buildings like the cathedral, according to the Utah Geological Survey. As reported by KSL News, the cathedral’s golden dome itself came through undamaged, and its bell towers had already undergone seismic upgrades before the quake hit, according to George Karahalios, the parish council president at Holy Trinity Cathedral. Still, the roof and choir loft were left with cracked plaster requiring repair, and examination of the damage ultimately pushed leaders toward a comprehensive retrofit rather than a patch job.
What the Retrofit Will Actually Change
The scope of the work is dramatic for a building this old: crews will strip the entire structure down to the brick, then add shotcrete to thicken and strengthen the walls, per the same KSL account. Karahalios said the exterior walls are going to come in six inches on each side, and specialized cranes will lift the cathedral dome so a diaphragm can be placed under and around it, allowing the dome to move with the earth during any future earthquake. The stained-glass windows will be boarded up during construction, and the iconostasis will be completely replaced, though some of the cathedral’s icons date back to 1906, and original icons will be displayed at the museum in the cathedral basement rather than lost to the renovation.
That basement space carries its own historical weight. The Hellenic Cultural Museum, dedicated on May 3, 1992, is recognized as the first Greek ethnic museum in the United States, according to Project MUSE, and it documents early 20th-century Greek immigrant labor and religious culture in the Intermountain West. Because the cathedral has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since July 8, 1975, per the National Park Service, every repair approval must go through federal historic preservation review before contractors can touch the walls.
Paying for an $18 Million Job
The renovation project’s overall cost is estimated between $16 million and $18 million, down from an original estimate of $20 million to $25 million, the same KSL report notes. Donations and fundraising have raised a little over $1 million so far toward the parish’s required 10 percent share of the total project cost, with government grants and funding expected to cover the remainder. The Utah State Legislature already appropriated $1 million in state grant funding to the cathedral for building renovations and seismic updates under Senate Bill 2 in 2025, according to Utah.gov records, with that money awarded through the state’s Department of Cultural and Community Engagement…