Entries from July 2009
Salt Lake 20th Ward
Peggy Fletcher Stack’s recent article in the Salt Take Tribune on historic Mormon meetinghouses is definitely worth a read. Stack’s question about who decides which of the LDS Church’s buildings will be renovated and which will not is an important one, especially in light of the 1971 razing of the Coalville Tabernacle. The fate of the tabernacle clearly had a galvanizing effect on Utah’s historic perservationist community, and helped to bring preservation-related issues to the attention of many of the state’s citizens, LDS and non-LDS alike.
Yale Ward
“In recent years,” Stack writes, the LDS Church “has developed a systematic way to manage the tension between the desire to preserve historic structures and the reality of contemporary congregational needs.” Naturally, money plays a part in the decision-making. “If one of these historic chapels needs a major repair,” writes Stack, “such as replacing a roof, boiler system or plumbing—Salt Lake City’s codes may require the church to include costly seismic or other upgrades. Such upgrades could make renovations impractical.”
But decisions aren’t necessarily top-down edicts. According to Steve Olsen of the LDS Church’s historic sites committee, judgments about properties with historical value are “are negotiated in good faith by all parties involved—from the physical-facilities managers to local ecclesiastical leaders to architects and historians.”
Salt Lake 2nd Ward
Don’t miss the Tribune’s multimedia tour of such architectural gems as the Highland Park Ward (2535 Douglas Street), Salt Lake 20th Ward (107 G Street), and Forest Dale Ward (729 E. Ashton Avenue) meetinghouses.
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Temple B'nai Israel (Courtesy Utah State History)
The Story:
In 1864, when Jewish settlers in Utah celebrated the high holy day of Yom Kippur, they did so in a private home. The territory’s Jewish community was still in its infancy, and grew slowly as westward-bound Jews made their way to the Great Basin. Many of the early Jewish migrants to Utah were merchants intent on taking advantage of new opportunities in the American West.
By 1881, Jewish pioneers had established Congregation B’nai Israel and had bought a plot of land for a synagogue and school at the intersection of Third South and First West in Salt Lake City. Two years later, due in no small part to the sacrifices of the congregation, the school and temple were finished. When the congregation decided to move to a new synagogue on Fourth South a few years later, the commission for the new building went to Philip Meyer, the nephew of Frederick Auerbach, one of Salt Lake’s leading businessmen. Meyer, who lived and studied in Germany, came to Utah at his uncle’s expense intent on building a structure that would please Utah’s Jewish community. What he designed was a scaled-down version of Berlin’s Great Synagogue, a magnificent structure that unfortunately was destroyed by Allied bombers in World War II.
After the synagogue was built, Meyer returned to Germany (where he later died at the hands of the Nazis), and Congregation B’nai Israel struggled on. The rise of a new congregation, this one made up of mostly Eastern European Jews, eventually challenged the dominance of the original group of worshippers, causing the Jewish community to split into factions. Through it all, the B’nai Israel temple remained a potent reminder of the pioneering spirit of Utah’s first Jewish settlers.
Sources:
See Eileen Hallet Stone. A Homeland in the West: Utah Jews Remember (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 1-20; Jack Goodman, “Jews in Zion,” in The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Z, Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1981), 187-220; and Ralph M. Tannenbaum’s entry on the Jewish Community in the online Utah History Encyclopedia at www.media.utah.edu/UHE.
Text © 2007 Utah Humanities Council
Images courtesy of Utah State History
Categories: Uncategorized
Courtesy Utah State History
© 2007 Utah Humanities Council
The Story:
On November 11, 1918, the signing of the armistice with Germany that effectively ended World War I became the spark that ignited a series of all-out, raucous celebrations across Utah. It’s not hard to imagine why Utahns met the news of the war’s end with more than a touch of loud revelry. The United States had only been involved in the war for a little more than a year and a half, but in that time more than 100,000 American soldiers had been killed or died of disease. (More than 600 of those fallen soldiers had come from Utah.) On the home front, Utahns sacrificed by going without meat on certain days, using meat and sugar substitutes, donating to the Red Cross, and buying war bonds.
When the war ended, people were understandably ecstatic. In Sevier County, citizens poured into the streets, bells rang nonstop, cannons roared, and flags began appearing outside homes and around public places. The people of Richfield arranged an ad hoc parade, complete with a giant effigy of Kaiser Wilhelm, the German leader, chained to the bed of a truck. According to the local newspaper, a nighttime raid on a stockpile of dynamite in Salina provided a troop of merrymakers with enough ammunition to make people wonder if they were hearing “an allied bombardment of a German front line.”
Courtesy Utah State History
Festivities in Price and Manti were more subdued, but no less genuine. Another effigy of the Kaiser was hung up in Manti and burned, and the entire town turned out for a community barbecue, while the mayor of Price declared an official holiday and citizens hauled giant logs down from the surrounding mountains to build a bonfire that eventually warmed more than two thousand revelers. The war was over, and celebrations like these seemed to function like a collective sigh of relief.
Sources:
See news reports about how Utahns celebrated the end of World War One in the following Utah newspapers: Richfield Reaper (November 16, 1918); Manti Messenger (November 15, 1918); and [Carbon County] News-Advocate (November 14, 1918).
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