Photoblogging: Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City, Utah. Elevation: 4227 feet MSL.

(The view out my hotel room window to the Southeast.)

(And to the Southwest. Mountains everywhere.)

I've never been here before, in spite of my criss-crossing the area many times in my career. I've waved as I passed many times, over the top of Vegas into Los Angeles, but SLC was always just a blip on the horizon to the North.




I was quite prepared to dislike the place, actually--it being the hub of a prominent religious movement--in much the same way that I suspect I won't be able to stomach Rome: I'm afraid it's not possible for it to be beautiful enough to compensate for all the misery it has dumped over humanity over the centuries--and that continues to flow from the place. But the dilemma here is that our hotel is a block from the Mormon Tabernacle, one of the world's miraculous acoustics and the home of maybe the single most famous organ in America. This instrument, from the Aeolian-Skinner firm (after the departure of Ernest M. Skinner) and the work of G. Donald Harrison, is a sonic miracle, one of those rare and serendipitous pairings of time and place and circumstance. I'll talk a bit more about it over at the music blog, where I reviewed a recording I picked up in the museum gift shop.





Anyway, I couldn't really be two blocks away and not go and see the place, so I stuffed my disgust and vowed to keep my mouth shut and walked over. It turns out to be a charming and unusual space, located inside the walled compound of the Mormon church headquarters. The tabernacle is a stand-alone structure with a striking, shiny metal roof, and is smaller than I expected, especially inside. But it's a unique space, with the organ in an absolutely glorious setting, prominently at the front of the hall, and the strange, domed roof arching above it like a cloudy sky. The organ is so gorgeous that it kind of takes your breath away. Walking around, the acoustics remind me of a huge Imax theater, with everything seemingly audible everywhere. They do a little acoustic demonstration where you can hear an actual pin dropped up on the stage from anywhere in the Tabernacle.





I didn't know what to expect, wandering past the guard post into the compound itself, into the jaws of the lion, as it were. Everyone I encountered within the walled compound was extremely friendly and helpful (and they all had name tags in case you wanted to address them properly). They all greet you as if they had known you all your life, which is superficially pleasant but a little disconcerting. It was a bit Disney-scary being approached by young women in pairs, dressed in simple cotton dresses, with "Sister XXXX" on their nametags, telling me that my glasses are very cool or encouraging to take as many photos as I liked. My wife chided me: "Maybe they're just really friendly people." Me: "They're in a walled compound; they're wearing name tags. They probably are actually friendly people. But they have an agenda."

Well, so did I. I came to see the organ, and there it was. Mission accomplished.



The rest of the campus, which seems about equally to include impressive office buildings and church buildings of various eras, was beautiful and spotless. It all looks expensive and official; clearly the coffers into which flows the money of the faithful are somewhere nearby. Tour groups wafted here and there, each led by very professionally-dressed tour leaders with name tags, many speaking in foreign languages.

The rest of SLC is charming, and quite a change for a flatlander like me. The city sits in a large bowl, surrounded by mountains to the East and West, and there is a sense of existing in rather than on the land. Most everything is clean, and people throughout the city were friendly. It reminds me of Denver in that there's a proliferation of outdoor shops and ski shops and skate shops; it seems a youthful, outdoor kind of city. I found a beautiful shopping area with a buzillion restaurants a couple blocks down from the hotel, one of the entrances to which goes thru a defunct Union Pacific railroad terminal. Cool. Within the limits of my meager photographic skills and my little 1 megapixel cell phone camera, here's a glimpse.