The Great Saltair: How Utah Built a Palace on the Lake, Burned It Down Twice, and Watched the Water Walk Away

The Great Saltair is a lake resort near Magna, about 15 miles west of Salt Lake City, that opened in 1893 as the “Coney Island of the West” and, after two fires and a drowning, survives today as a concert hall standing in dry flats where the Great Salt Lake used to be. Three buildings have carried the name. The one you see from Interstate 80, with its cream domes shimmering above the salt, is the third — and it started life as an airplane hangar.

Here is the whole strange arc, from the palace on stilts to the stranded building of today.

A Moorish palace built on 2,000 wooden posts

In 1893 a corporation tied to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints partnered with a railway company and spent about $350,000 to build a resort out over the water. Saltair opened on Memorial Day that year. The architect, Richard K.A. Kletting — the same man who would later design the Utah State Capitol — gave it onion domes, arches, and towers in the Moorish Revival style, and set the whole thing on more than 2,000 wooden posts and pilings driven into the lakebed. From the shore it looked like a sultan’s palace had floated in and parked itself on the Great Salt Lake.

The point was wholesome fun. The church wanted a family destination, an antidote to the rowdier lakeside spots, and a reason to ride the new Salt Lake & Los Angeles Railway that ran straight to the front door. It worked beyond anyone’s plans. Saltair became the most popular family destination west of New York, a genuine Western answer to Coney Island, with a dance floor, a midway, carnival rides, and a bathing beach where the whole point was that you could not sink.

Why you float instead of swim

The Great Salt Lake is so salty you cannot really swim in it. You bob. Salinity in parts of the lake runs many times that of the ocean, dense enough that a person floats like a cork with their chest and knees above the surface. For decades that was Saltair’s headline attraction. You walked off the pavilion, waded in, leaned back, and the lake held you up. Postcards showed rows of people reading newspapers while floating, feet in the air. No swimming skill required, which was exactly the pitch to families.

The 1920s: a quarter-million-person summer

The resort peaked in the 1920s. In 1919 alone, attendance hit 450,000. Special trains ran packed from downtown. The church had sold the resort in 1906, but its popularity kept climbing under new owners, and for a stretch Saltair was simply where Salt Lake City went in the summer.

Then came the fire. On April 22, 1925, the original pavilion and several other buildings burned. The cause was never firmly established. Investors rebuilt fast, and the second Saltair opened in May 1926 with a new draw: a dance floor billed as the largest in the world. Where the first Saltair sold the float and the midway, the second sold the swing bands — the traveling orchestras of the era filled that enormous floor.

Everything that went wrong next

The second Saltair never recaptured the first one’s magic, and the reasons stacked up. Motion pictures and radio kept people home. The Great Depression thinned every crowd. A 1931 fire did over $100,000 in damage. Then, in 1933, the lake pulled a trick it would repeat for the rest of the century: the water receded so far the resort was left high and dry, and Saltair had to build a miniature railway just to shuttle bathers out to where the lake had gone.

World War II forced it to close. It reopened after the war into a world that no longer drove “all the way out there” for a lake day. Saltair shut down in 1958, and the passenger railway that fed it stopped running the same year.

Two arson fires and a final ending

The old resort limped through the 1960s as people tried and failed to revive it. An arson fire in September 1967 destroyed the concourse, the entry gate, and the concession stands but spared the main hall. The main hall’s turn came in November 1970, when an arsonist set fire to the center of that famous wooden dance floor and the pavilion that had stood since 1926 burned to the ground. That was the end of the old Saltair.

The third Saltair is an Air Force hangar

The building you see today went up in 1981, driven by the new Interstate 80 and the growth spreading west into the valley. There was no money for another Moorish palace. Instead, builders hauled in a salvaged aircraft hangar from Hill Air Force Base and set it up about a mile west of where the original had stood. The domes and arches on the outside are a nod to the ghost of the first building. The bones are military surplus.

The lake was not done. Within months of opening, the high-water years of the early 1980s flooded the new resort. The waters eventually pulled back — and then kept pulling back, past the shoreline, past the parking lot, out into the flats, leaving the third Saltair as landlocked as its predecessors had been in 1933.

What Saltair is now

Since 2005, a group of investors from the music industry has owned the building and run it as a concert venue, a roughly 4,000-capacity hall that hosts touring acts through the year. It has been a film backdrop more than once — key scenes of the 1962 cult horror film Carnival of Souls were shot at the second Saltair, and the Beach Boys posed there for a 1968 photo session. The Pixies named a song “Palace of the Brine” after it.

It also has a reputation as one of the most “haunted” spots in Utah, the kind of place ghost-tour outfits and paranormal TV crews build episodes around. Treat that as folklore and marketing, not history — the documented record is dramatic enough without it.

Then and now: the water walked away

The cruelest part of Saltair’s story is the one still unfolding. The resort existed because you could step off its deck and float in the lake. You cannot do that easily today. The Great Salt Lake has trended toward historic low water levels in recent years, sitting well below the level scientists consider the minimum for a healthy lake, after winters that have repeatedly brought below-normal snowpack.

For a visitor, that means the shore at Saltair is now a long walk from the building — often a half mile or more of cracked flats before you reach water shallow and briny enough to bob in. The palace was built to sit on the lake. Now it waits for the lake to come back.