Temple Square and the Organ That Fills a Room Built for God
Temple Square and the Organ That Fills a Room Built for God
Temple Square occupies ten acres in the center of Salt Lake City, and its granite walls contain the spiritual and architectural heart of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Salt Lake Temple — 40 years in construction, completed in 1893 from granite quarried in Little Cottonwood Canyon — rises in Gothic-meets-fortress splendor, its six spires topped with the golden angel Moroni catching the morning sun and throwing it back at the Wasatch Mountains.
Non-members cannot enter the Temple, but the Tabernacle next to it is open to all, and it is the building that justifies the visit regardless of your faith or lack thereof. The Tabernacle is a massive, dome-roofed auditorium built in the 1860s without a single interior pillar — the roof is supported by an ingenious lattice of wooden trusses that span 150 feet and create acoustics so sensitive that a pin dropped at the pulpit can be heard in the back row, 170 feet away. The guides will demonstrate this with a nail and a hushed room, and the click is genuinely audible, and genuinely startling.
The Tabernacle organ is one of the largest in the world — 11,623 pipes, ranging from the thickness of a pencil to 32 feet tall — and the free noon recitals (Monday-Saturday, 12:00 PM, 30 minutes) are the best free cultural experience in Utah. The organ fills the room with a sound that is not so much heard as felt — the bass notes vibrate in your chest, the treble rings in the dome, and the whole building seems to breathe with the instrument.
What visitors miss: The Conference Center across the street has a rooftop garden with a waterfall and meadow landscape that covers 3.5 acres, planted with native grasses and wildflowers. Most visitors don't know it's accessible to the public. The view from the roof — Temple Square below, the city around, the mountains above — puts the whole enterprise in perspective: a community that built something enormous and then put a garden on top of it, as if to say that even ambition needs a place to rest.