A school for a thousand students stood empty for twenty years

A school built for a thousand students outgrew itself

You are standing inside the Provo City Library, but the building itself is older than its name. It went up in 1892 as the Brigham Young Academy, designed to hold a thousand students, one of the largest school buildings in the Rocky Mountain West. Its principal, Karl G. Maeser, worked out the design with Don Carlos Young, son of Brigham Young, as the architect. The bell tower sat empty for its first twenty years — a triangle struck by hand called students to class, because the bell installed in 1912 turned out to have a dull, poor sound. In 1919 a better bell was pulled from the old Provo Tabernacle, torn down that year, and hung here instead. The school outgrew the building and moved on to become Brigham Young University. The building kept changing names as it emptied of purpose — the High School Building, then the Education Building — as if nobody could decide what to call a place that no longer had students in it.

A professor fought to save a rotting square

For close to two decades, Academy Square sat empty and rotting. Developers wanted it gone. A parking lot or a strip of new construction would have been easier and cheaper than saving four aging brick buildings nobody was using. Provo residents pushed back. The fight to keep the old Academy standing became personal for one man: BYU professor L. Douglas Smoot, who spent years raising money and support for its restoration. People started calling him "the man who saved Academy Square." In February 1997 a $16 million bond passed, the money that finally let the city preserve the building rather than lose it.

The other three structures on the square were beyond saving, or beyond affording. They were demolished to make room for a parking garage. Only the Academy building itself, the one under your feet now, was kept. Ground broke for its renovation on July 9, 1999. On September 8, 2001, it reopened as the Provo City Library, its shelves eventually holding close to 285,000 books, magazines, and media.

A shoemaker's plain house survived by paperwork

seventy-seven meters away stands a much smaller survivor. Peter Wentz built his home sometime between 1866 and 1870, a plain two-story salt-box house on a cobblestone foundation, one room wide. Wentz had walked most of the way to Utah after converting to the LDS Church in Pennsylvania, apprenticed as a boot and shoemaker, and eventually settled in Provo trading goods and working the shoe trade. He served ten years on the Provo City Council, sat as a Justice of the Peace, and spent eighteen years as the first bishop of the Timpanogas Ward. His house is unremarkable to look at, plain outward walls, two fireplaces, a stone cellar — but it is one of the only things on this block that predates the twentieth century. Modern condominiums now surround it on every side. The house needed its own historic landmark designation, granted in April 1996, to keep from being swallowed the way everything around it was.

A mansion's hand-painted bricks could not save it alone

A little further on, one hundred thirty-six meters from where you stand, sits a house that could not rely on modesty to survive. The John E. Booth House, built in 1900, is the only two-and-a-half-story Victorian mansion left in Provo. Its bricks were individually hand-painted in shades of brown and tan to create a mottled, variegated look, a detail unusual enough that local histories still note it. Booth himself was deeply active in Provo's civic and religious life. But being unusual wasn't protection enough. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places only in 1982, and given city landmark status in 1995 — paperwork standing between it and the kind of demolition that had already claimed buildings nearby.

A firing squad killed a man with no rescue campaign

Not everything on this ground was saved. In 1879, Wallace Wilkerson was executed by firing squad in Provo under Utah Territorial law, convicted of murder. There was no rescue campaign for him, no bond, no professor fighting to keep him standing. His death is one entry in a town that otherwise measures itself by what it managed to keep.