Steve and Carol took me on a sightseeing tour today of Salt Lake City. Bob stayed home to work on getting the truck running again and a few other odds and ends he wanted to accomplish. Oh boy, did he miss out!
I knew I wanted to see the famous Mormon Tabernacle so that's where we headed, to Temple Square, a 10-acre refuge with beautifully landscaped grounds surrounding the Salt Lake Temple, pictured below.
Four days after entering the Salt Lake Valley on 24 July 1847, Brigham Young designated where the temple would be built, and on 6 April 1853, he laid the cornerstone of the temple foundation. Little did he know how long the construction would take.
Many difficulties slowed the building of the temple. Granite was quarried in Little Cottonwood Canyon, 20 miles from Temple Square, and transported to the site by teams of oxen. A single wagon load required four days of travel to reach the temple site. I don't care how big your oxen are they can only pull so much, no wonder it took so long to build!
Work on the temple stretched from years to decades until finally, 40 years after it was begun, the temple was completed and dedicated on 6 April 1893.
Is it any wonder it took so long??? As a side note, there are no tours inside the temple.
The Assembly Hall, built in 1877, is today where the Temple Square Concert Series presents complimentary hour-long concerts featuring local and international artists every Friday and Saturday evening.
Across from the Temple is the Tabernacle. It is not at all what I expected. I expected the building to be more,,,,more,,,,church-ly.
Construction on the Tabernacle began in 1863 and ended in 1875. The exterior of the completed building is 150 feet wide, 250 feet long, and 80 feet high. This unique Tabernacle was a marvel of its time. Through a bridge-building technique, the Tabernacle roof was able to span its 150-foot width without center supports, an amazing achievement in both engineering and acoustics.
Speaking of acoustics, the dome shaped auditorium which is so acoustically sensitive that a pin dropped at the pulpit can be clearly heard at the back of the hall, 170 feet away. Keeping that in mind, my first thought on this was how many times the whole gathering heard a toddler whisper to its mom...."Mom, I gotta pee!"
This Tabernacle is home to the 360 members of the world renowned Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The choir has performed in numerous countries and has released more than 150 albums.
If you have a choir, you certainly need an organ!
The Tabernacle organ has an interesting history. President Brigham Young asked Joseph Harris Ridges, who was born and raised near an organ factory in England, to build the first Tabernacle organ. Timber was located and brought by volunteers from the Parowan and Pine Valley mountains, 300 miles south of Salt Lake City. In the beginning, the organ was powered by hand-pumped bellows, later by water power, and today by electricity. With improved techniques in organ construction, the instrument has been renovated and enlarged several times. Today it has 11,623 pipes and the console has 5 manuals, or keyboards. The Tabernacle organ is considered to be one of the finest organs in the world.
Next we went to the Conference Center, a truly magnificent building!
The auditorium in the Conference Center seats 21,000, and a separate theater in the building seats an additional 850. The building is constructed of granite from the same quarry which provided the granite for the Salt Lake Temple.
Twenty one thousand seats and not one has a blocked view!
The Conference Center occupies 10 acres of this whole complex. Below the center is a four-level underground parking structure and the roof of the Conference Center offers amazing views of Temple Square and of the Salt Lake Valley. Four acres of pools and gardens have been landscaped to give visitors a unique display of Utah's trees, wild grasses and flowers. All this on the roof!
Other Facts about the Conference Center
1.5 million square feet (total building and parking structure)—about 40 times the size of the Tabernacle (250 ft. long 150 ft. wide).
The main auditorium is large enough to house a Boeing 747 jet with room to spare.
The Conference Center will seat 21,000 plus all the General Authorities and the Salt Lake Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Four-level underground parking with 1,300 parking spaces.
An estimated 116,000 total cubic yards of concrete were poured for the building. Stacking one cubic yard (3ft. x 3ft. x 3ft.) on top of another, you would have a column 66 miles high. Also, one cubic yard being approximately equal to 202 U.S. gallons, Legacy Constructors poured almost 23.5 million gallons of concrete.
4 acres of landscaped roof with fountains, waterfalls, trees, planters, flowers, and a 3-acre meadow complete with irrigation systems.
Translation facilities for up to 60 languages simultaneously, second only to the United Nations.
50,000 miles of electrical wiring (enough to circle the earth two times) and 780 miles of electrical conduit.
13 passenger elevators, 12 escalators, and 3 service and stage elevators.
Custom-built organ with 130 ranks of pipes, totaling 7,667 individual pipes.
The King Truss—the main support beam for the building—weighs approximately 621 tons. It would take 3-4 blue whales (up to 190 metric tons each) or 69 African elephants (up to 9 tons each) to equal the weight of the King Truss.
Approximately 1,100 employees on-site during peak construction schedule; more than 80 subcontractors involved in construction.
Our first stop was the auditorium.
There are several hall areas like this in the building. Absolutely huge! Take note of the lighted area on the left hand side, the next picture shows what hangs there. The picture doesn't do it justice because it doesn't show the light from the skylight, take my word for it, its beautiful!
The artist of this bronze statue really paid attention to detail!
He even put in a little bird in a nest.
Now I'm not knowledgeable at all about art, heck, I can't even draw decent stick people and I just marvel at how Charles Schultz draws Snoopy, so you can imagine my awe when I stood before works of art that truly seem to speak to you.
This is one continuous piece of canvas! I wish I had gotten a close up of this to show you the detail that went into the bodies of the people in the painting. You expected them to move at any minute they were so lifelike.
The light in the next picture is NOT from my flash, its how the artist painted it.
....and sculptures were just as breathtaking.
This one is named The Savior.
I don't recall the name of the next one, or even if it had a name, but I do remember our tour guide telling us that this is NOT painted but in fact were the colors within the stone therefore telling us that this sculptor knew the material with which he/she was working with.
This one is called First Vision with the explanation of it pictured below it.
I hope you can read this, click to enlarge if you can't.
By this time Steve had told me that I had to go to the bathroom. Let me explain that. It seems every time I had to make use of the ladies room just seconds before I could get the words out Steve would point out a ladies room to me. It was like he knew before I did! Well, anyway, Carol and I had to "go" and we went. Well, let me tell you, I have never, ever seen such a large ladies room! Since I've given you so many facts about this building let me add one more, there were 45 stalls in this ladies room! Yes, we counted them.
Our next stop was the roof of the Conference Center.
So many fountains on the roof!
Steve, Carol and me taking a break.
The skylights.
Views from the roof of the conference center.
Back inside we walked up a winding staircase. Now this place has a special name and for the life of me I can't think of it. I think from now on I need to not only bring my camera but paper and pencil!
This was on the wall as we walked up the steps.
When we got to the top we found seats in front of this.
To say it was "peaceful" sitting there wouldn't be enough. There were two young ladies who spoke to the crowd but I couldn't understand a word of it as they spoke in German. I had the feeling that every time the program was given it was done in a different language. I could be wrong about this.
By now we're hungry! Steve picked Lamb's Grill Cafe to have lunch in. He could not have made a better choice as far as I was concerned! Lamb's is the oldest, continuously operating restaurant in Utah. It was established in 1919.
The booths, tables and chairs are all from the 1920's when they were bought for this restaurant.
The counter wasn't busy the day we were there but I could picture many a business deal being made over lunch at this counter in years gone by.
Back at the rig Bob got our truck running again and all is well. He called Good Sam, our Emergency Roadside Assistance team and they arrived within 45 minutes and had the batteries charged.
Once again Carol made us a delicious dinner and we had corn on the cob! YUMMY!
I hope you enjoyed the trip Salt Lake City.
Oh yeah, before I forget, I added something to the Labor Day Weekend post. Steve had sent me an email to let us know how safe our rig was in their yard so I added to the date we received it. Check it out, you are sure to get a chuckle!
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