A burned tabernacle rebuilt as a temple
The Provo City Center Temple stands on ground that has held a public meeting hall since the 1850s, where an 1880s red sandstone tabernacle, designed by William H. Folsom and dedicated in 1898, burned down to its brick shell in a 2010 fire before being rebuilt and dedicated as a Latter-day Saint temple in Provo in 2016.
Fire gutted the tabernacle before it rose as a temple
The Provo City Center Temple is now a temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, standing on ground that has held a public meeting hall since the 1850s. Its red sandstone walls, blue towers, and arched windows are the ones built here in the 1880s, not new ones. Construction on this tabernacle began in 1883 under direction tied to church president John Taylor. The architect was William H. Folsom, who also designed the Manti temple, and workers kept building after an earlier, smaller tabernacle on the same block was judged too small by Brigham Young back in 1867. The new building could seat 3,000 people and held its first general conference sessions in 1886 and 1887, before it was even finished. It was not formally dedicated until 1898, when George Q. Cannon presided over a ceremony attended by more than 4,000 people, including church president Joseph F. Smith. Over the following decades the tabernacle hosted more than worship. Entertainer Abbie Carrington performed here in 1891. President William H. Taft spoke inside the building in 1909. Pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff gave a concert here in 1938, filling the hall built for Mormon congregations with Russian piano music. The building was updated again in 1963 and 1964, with fresh paint and new wiring and heating. It carried on as Provo's gathering place for funerals, graduations, and church conferences for most of a century.
On the night of December 16, 2010, a rehearsal was underway for a production of Lex de Azevedo's Gloria. A lighting technician had removed two 300-watt light fixtures from the attic for the show, set one down on a wooden speaker box, and left the bulb in. Around 2:30 a.m. On December 17, the box caught fire. Firefighters fought the blaze for hours. Around 5:00 a.m. The roof collapsed, pulling down part of the front wall with it. The interior burned out almost completely. Only the brick shell, the towers, and the outer walls survived.
On October 1, 2011, church president Thomas S. Monson announced the building would rise again, not as a tabernacle but as a temple, with its scorched walls kept standing and restored. Brigham Young University archaeologists moved in before construction began. Digging through the old basement, they found the original 1861 meetinghouse foundation and baptismal font underneath, along with coins and other small objects dropped through the floorboards decades earlier. Painted plaster fragments turned up too, showing the baptistry's walls had once been painted sky blue. The groundbreaking came on May 12, 2012, led by Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
Rebuilding meant holding up what little remained. Crews wrapped the old walls in reinforced concrete and extra brick, then lifted the whole structure onto 40-foot steel stilts so workers could dig out two new basement levels underneath. Three of the four original corner towers were saved and restored. The fourth was too badly burned and had to be rebuilt from scratch. Workers salvaged what stained glass, finials, and hardware they could from the wreckage and worked them back into the new building. The tabernacle's old pulpit survived the fire and now sits in the temple's chapel. Construction finished on December 17, 2015, exactly five years to the day after the fire started. A public open house ran from January 15 to March 5, 2016. The temple was dedicated on March 20, 2016, by Dallin H. Oaks, and Russell M. Nelson attended.
While the temple rose, the ground underneath it was changing hands on paper. In August 2012, the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sold a nearby parcel to Nu Skin International. The parcel directly under the temple itself, recorded by Utah County as S University Ave, was carved out and created fresh in 2013, as the rebuild went on above it. That parcel measures just over 2.26 acres. In December 2016, months after the dedication, the same church corporation deeded this parcel to the Temple Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which holds it today.
The temple now stands finished on University Avenue, its sandstone walls and blue towers restored to the tabernacle's original 1898 design.
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