Porter Block

The Porter Block wears a catalog. Built in 1898, its entire two-story front is pressed and cast metal — columns, cornice, urns, and scrollwork that only look like carved stone — ordered from a catalog the way one might order a stove. It was a very Industrial-Age way to build: modular metal facades, shipped by rail and bolted up, let a booming railroad town raise fashionable-looking storefronts fast and cheap. Behind this one, at first, were a tailor, a candy shop, and a barber. The metal front still faces 25th Street, one of Utah's best examples of the type.

What the plaque says

One of the by products of the Industrial Age was the manufacturing of metal architectural building components. Beginning with the development of cast iron buildings in Eastern America in the 1840's, systems of using replicable, modular, pre-assembled structural systems were expanded during the Victorian era to include cornices and entire facades. The facades could be designed by selecting motifs out of a mail-order catalog. A good example of such construction in Ogden is the Porter Block, constructed in 1898 as a two-story building. The architecture is Commercial Victorian with an all-metal facade which mimics classical columns, a bracketed cornice, urns, and other motifs which were usually executed in stone, brick, wood or plaster. The building originally housed a tailor, candy retailer and barber. Ogden City Register of Historic Resources City

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ogden Union Station — steps away
  A grand 1924 train depot turned museum complex
• Snowbasin — 6.1 mi
  One of the country's oldest ski areas and a 2002 Olympic downhill venue — world-class terrain that somehow still skis uncrowded.
• Hill Aerospace Museum — 7.2 mi
  Over 90 military aircraft displayed indoors and on the tarmac
• Powder Mountain — 15 mi
  The largest ski resort in the United States by acreage — a famously uncrowded "PowMow" now remaking itself under Netflix's Reed Hastings.

More markers nearby

• The Solomon C. Stephens Building — steps away
• The Union Restaurant & Switch Euro. Lodgings — steps away
• The James O. Stephens Building — steps away
• London Ice Cream Parlor — steps away