The Voice of History: Meditations on the Historical Preservation of Salt Lake City's Nettie Gregory Center
By Wes Long
As a writer for Salt Lake’s alternative newspaper City Weekly, I am always on the lookout for possible story ideas — when something or someone catches my eye or arouses my curiosity, I make note of that person or that thing and keep them on the backburner for future use. Having been a history major at the University of Utah, my list of potential story subjects are often historically-based. Such was the case with the life of Nettie Grimes Gregory (1890-1964), to whom I was first introduced on the pages of a 1991 publication by the Utah Historical Society.
As profiled among a series of minibiographies of 20th-century Utahns in Beehive History, I was impressed by their description of this native Tennessean who came to Utah with her husband William in the 1910s:
Nettie Gregory quickly adapted to life in Utah and sought to make herself useful to the community. She was especially concerned about the lack of wholesome recreation for young people living on the city’s west side. She and her husband began some activities at the Calvary Baptist Church but found that the number of young people wanting to participate exceeded the capacity of the church’s facilities. The answer was obvious to the Gregorys. Their neighborhood needed its own building with adequate space for a variety of community activities, including weddings, socials, and youth programs. William Gregory donated a small parcel of land, and according to Deseret News reporter Rose Mary Pederson, Nettie Gregory “recruited black women belonging to the Salt Lake Community Club and the Nimble Thimble Club to act as leaders in the fund-raising drive.[1]
Holding bake sales, fish fries, and bazaars for years, Salt Lake City’s Black community not only raised the funds but supplied the off-hour labors to build what became the Nettie Gregory Center, at 742 W. South Temple. Dedicated in 1964, the building served young and old of every color and creed for decades before shuttering in the aughts of the 21st century. Possessing the dual distinction of providing a meeting place for Salt Lake’s Black community in response to local segregation and offering the larger west side community a needed recreation outlet, the Nettie Gregory Center meant many things to many people.
Gary Oliver, a board member with Nettie Gregory Center, recalled at the January 2025 retreat: “We kids had to go to different organizations and churches around the valley. The Nettie Gregory Center was the first time we could play on our own home ground.”[2]
The voice of history had thus beckoned, and the City Weekly newspaper responded with a cover story on the Nettie Gregory Center for February 2023. It was a profound honor to research the story of the building and to interview as many of its alumni as we could find. I was impressed by the good that the center had evidently left upon so many lives yet saddened by how underappreciated its overall legacy was within modern Salt Lake City culture. Amazingly, the building had thus far not been cited for preservation efforts, either. All of these considerations warranted substantive reporting, as did the ongoing efforts to breathe new life into the center by its current owners:
For the past several years, the building has stood unused. But proprietor Duane Bourdeaux has plans to bring it back. While many of the details are still being formulated, Bourdeaux is optimistic about the prospects of what the center can offer the local community today. “There’s a lot of history in the African American community that used the center,” Bourdeaux says. “We want to be able to do the same thing.”[3]
The public response to the published story was gratifyingly warm and I was humbled to be invited onto the Nettie Gregory Center Board and to be brought into dialogue with members of the Utah Historical Society.
Jordan Kiyak, UHS Research Outreach Coordinator, introduced me to Women’s History Initiative Coordinator Katherine Kitterman in March 2023, the latter having already been in conversation with the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) about nominating the Nettie Gregory Center with the National Register of Historic Places. We collectively arranged a public meeting for the following month at Salt Lake City’s Marmalade library branch between representatives of UHS,SHPO, the Nettie Gregory Center Board and some descendants of the Gregorys to discuss a future nomination effort.
Since that time, a variety of efforts have been undertaken by groups of committed supporters and partners to not only A.) build a case for the Nettie Gregory Center’s nomination but also B.) to renovate and reopen the building. The former efforts have involved members of SHPO examining and reporting on the current condition of the structure and UHS’ Peoples of Utah Revisited events like the September 2023 Scan and Share event to record local oral histories and digitally preserve photographs relating to use of the building. The latter efforts have been undertaken by the Nettie Gregory board itself, which has consisted in reconstituting its numbers with additional members, securing nonprofit status and — as of this writing — continuing preparations for a capital campaign.
The January 2025 board retreat was helpful and enlightening for someone as inexperienced as myself. I have never served on a nonprofit board before, I haven’t much experience with assisting in a capital campaign, and my understanding of the details involved in historical preservation are minimal. I am just an obscure writer who was fortunate enough to report on a building, a community, and a legacy that truly spoke to me—as it has spoken to so many others down through Utah’s history.
It is to the credit of that incalculable number of people — past and present — who believe in the center’s mission or respect its place in history and have done or are doing something to keep it alive. Whether board members of the Nettie Gregory Center, members of the Utah Historical Society’s Peoples of Utah Revisited initiative, experts at the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, collaborating local organizations and so many more, the call of history is indeed answered by a multitude of ready hands and receptive hearts.
Spoken more broadly — and as is the case with all lived histories and heritages — we either respond to the distant echo or hold a bequeathed garment in our hands. Whichever way we have received the history before us, it is ours for a brief time to do something with it and to answer its call with our own voice. I am in awe of what power and life history unlocks once we decide to take it seriously, because history does indeed communicate with itself, and we are part of that process.
Just consider who may benefit from any of the varied studies in this publication some day far off into the future. You see? The conversation continues…
[1]Murphy, Miriam B., ed. 1991. “20th-Century Utahns of Achievement.” Beehive History 17: 17.
[2]Oliver, Gary E. 2025. Comments at Nettie Gregory Center, Inc. board retreat. Salt Lake City, Utah.
[3]Long, Wes. 2023. “Remembering Salt Lake City’s Nettie Gregory Center and the African American Community that Built It.” Salt Lake City Weekly, February 2, 2023. https://www.cityweekly.net/utah/remembering-salt-lake-citys-nettie-gregory-center-and-the-african-american-community-that-built-it/Content?oid=19520513.