Salt Lake City’s Temple Square

Today was a very special experience; it was one of the highlights of our trip, in fact... we had a tour of Salt Lake City with local friends Rebecca and Jerry. We had met them while visiting Santa Fe; they also were in a 40 ft motor coach, and invited us to visit when we came through Ogden. Our first stop was Temple Square, the 35 acres in downtown which serves as the headquarters and spiritual center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Suzanne and I had both served with several Navy friends who were LDS, and had been impressed by their quiet dedication to their faith, their family-centered life outside the Navy, and their general air of happiness with life. We were looking forward to this tour to find out more about LDS.

 

You can’t help but notice the Salt Lake Temple. It towers above most of Salt Lake City, and is topped with a gold statue of the Angel Moroni.

Built between 1853 and 1893, it is a beautiful structure built of local granite, much of it hauled from nearby quarries on oxen-powered carts.

Non-LDS visitors cannot go inside, but the Visitor’s Center has a scale model with a cutaway inside to show you what you’re missing.

Assembly Hall’s gray granite walls, white spires, and stained glass windows were somewhat reminiscent of New England, and the organ inside was impressive, but smaller than what was to come. 

The grounds of Temple Square are impeccably groomed, with beautiful flowers everywhere. (I think The Villages may have sent some of their gardeners here for training back when...)

Our next stop was The Tabernacle, original home of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; our tour guides were two young LDS women missionaries, one from Spain and the other from Cambodia, serving their 18 month mission here at Temple Square. The Tabernacle was built in 1864-1867. The enormous domed roof is built in a lattice-truss arch system using dowels and wedges, rather than nails, to hold it all together. (Nails were very scarce in pioneer Utah.) The roof structure is nine feet thick, and skeptics predicted it would collapse, but it has held up for over 100 years with no problems at all.

The acoustics are incredible - the Tabernacle is a “nearly acoustically perfect” building; our tour guide went to the pulpit and spoke without a microphone; you could hear her clearly at the back of the Tabernacle. Then she tore a sheet of newspaper and dropped a pin onto the podium; again, both could be heard clearly throughout the 7,000 seat Tabernacle. The acoustics are so good because of the roof’s three-dimensional ellipse design, with the pulpit at one focus of the ellipse. The organ in the Tabernacle has 11,623 pipes, making it one of the largest pipe organs in the world.

The North Visitors Center was amazing, with this 11-foot marble Christus statue, an interactive diorama of Jerusalem during Christ’s time there, and two art galleries.

Last stop was at the Conference Center, which seats 21,000 people. We enjoyed part of an organ recital, and will attend a full recital tomorrow. (While Suzanne knew I enjoyed classical music, she was surprised by my delight in the organ recital. Somehow over our 16 years of marriage, I had failed to mention that my mother had been a church organist as well as a pianist. I felt sort of silly to have forgotten to mention that...)

Our tour guide then took us to the roof. I wanted to ask, “Why the roof?” Well, the roof was a shock! This may look like a field, but it's on top of a four story building.

There were four acres of surface up there, planted with dozens of pine and fir trees, hundreds of wildflowers, and a field of lush prairie grasses... you really could have been in the mountains or out on the prairie... oh, and did I mention the stream and waterfall cascading down the south façade?

It had been an amazing afternoon, and we capped it off with a gourmet early dinner with Rebecca and Jerry at Biaggi’s Ristorante Italiano; Suzanne had the seared tuna on mushroom risotto; I had the fresh fennel seed/black peppercorn crusted salmon a la Milanese, served with grilled shrimp, creamy Italian rice with asparagus and saffron, and a lemon-basil butter sauce. Everything was molto delizioso. (I think I may have to try to copy that meal when we get back home!)

Finally, we enjoyed watching these kids cooling off in a patio with water spouts; it was in the high 90s, but they were having fun!