-The Provo City center was originally the Provo Tabernacle. After a fire had left the tabernacle unusable the prophet President Thomas S. Monson announced they would make the old tabernacle into the new Provo City Center Temple. It has been called ”a phoenix rising out of the ashes.”
-It took fifteen years for the original tabernacle to be built and it was through many years of sacrifice and hardship to finally get the Provo Tabernacle done.
-The Provo City Center Temple is the fourth temple made from an existing building, and the second temple built from a tabernacle(the first was the Vernal Utah Temple)
-When building the new Provo City Center Temple the workers were challenged to not waste or destroy ONE brick, unless they had to.
-Trying to save as much of the old tabernacle as possible they lifted off the spires, worried about any possible destruction, but the spires came right off, held down originally by only gravity. Three of the four spires were reinforced and put on the temple. The fourth spire had extensive fire damage and had to be completely replaced. They also said that the old tabernacle was held up by the roof, and taking the roof off was a scary moment(worried the whole building would fall), but the walls still stood without the roof!
-In order to build a new temple within the old tabernacle, while preserving the original structure, they had to stabilize the buildings shell by giving the walls more strength. Once the walls were stabilized the crews rested the 6.8 million pound tabernacle on 40-foot steel stilts. The temple walls stayed suspended in the air for months while the crew worked on excavating the basement. Although this technique had been done before, it had never been done on a 130 year old building.
-When the temple/tabernacle walls were on stilts it was hard for the temples building workers to sleep at night. They were told this technique would work, but if crazy winds or weather would hit that could cause major problems.
-More than five years after the tabernacle’s fire the new Provo City Center Temple was dedicated on March 20, 2016.
-The Provo City Center Temple is the 150th dedicated temple in operation. The original tabernacle was 30,000 and now the City Center Temple is 85,084 square feet.
-The Provo Temple is a connection between the past and the present. To have the structure that the pioneers sacrificed to build into a beautiful temple is inspiring!
Sources:
”Temples of the New Millennium” by Chad S. Hawkins p. 302-303
https://churchofjesuschristtemples.org/provo-city-center-temple/