If you stand at the corner of Center Street and University Avenue and look at the building on the southwest, you are looking at something strange: an exterior that is more than a century old wrapped around an interior that is younger than most of the students walking past it.
Everyone in Provo knows the outline of the story — the tabernacle burned, and they made it a temple. Almost nobody knows the parts that are interesting: that the famous photograph of the surviving painting shows something different from what people think it shows, that the building spent months standing on steel beams and micropiles, or that nobody can quite agree what year the tabernacle was built — including the church that built it.
Here is the whole thing, from the tabernacle nobody remembers to the temple that is currently the only working one in the city.
The first tabernacle
The building that burned in 2010 was the second tabernacle on that block, not the first. The first tabernacle's site and what remains of it are covered in our walking history of the block.
The original was dedicated in 1867. It served as a meetinghouse and general gathering place, the closest thing frontier Provo had to a civic hall. It was too small from the day it was dedicated, Brigham Young noted the need for a new one in his dedicatory address, and some 15 years later a larger tabernacle was approved for the same block.
With the site cleared after the fire, the ground under the old block became accessible for the first time in generations, which gave researchers a chance to look for traces of the first building.
The building that burned
The second tabernacle was designed by William Harrison Folsom, who had worked on the Manti Temple and several other Church buildings. He was asked to pattern it after the Salt Lake Assembly Hall, and he gave Provo a Victorian Gothic Revival hall, 20 feet longer and 10 feet wider than the Assembly Hall, with an octagonal staircase tower at each corner. The project took 13 years to complete.
Two details from its working life are worth knowing, because they explain why the loss landed so hard:
- For most of the twentieth century it was the valley's actual auditorium: graduations for Brigham Young Academy and then BYU, funerals, concerts, civic ceremonies, community Christmas programs. If something in Utah County needed a room bigger than a church, this was the room.
Nobody agrees when it was built
Try to pin the construction date and the sources fall apart in your hands:
- 1882 — the church's own Newsroom, in its open-house announcement
- 1883 — most historical accounts, and Church News reporting on the fire itself
- 1885 — the same Newsroom article that says 1882, a few sentences earlier, describing the building as dating back to 1885
- 1898 — the year the Church News almanac gives for the tabernacle's completion
Some of that is real ambiguity: construction began in the early 1880s, the building was in use before it was finished, and it was not completed until 1898. A building that takes that long to complete has several defensible birthdays. But the spread is a good reminder that an official host is not the same as a current or self-consistent page — a single church-published article carries two different dates for the same building.
The central tower's weight became a problem early: the 1975 National Register nomination says the building was partly condemned in 1918 over it, condemned again in 1949, and that architect Fred Markham removed the tower and rebuilt the roof in 1950. (The 1917 date that circulates may come from a stained-glass window change that year, which the Church History exhibit records.) The tower was restored as part of the temple design.
The night of December 16, 2010
A production of Lex de Azevedo's Gloria was being staged and filmed in the tabernacle. Around 200 singers and musicians and a film crew rehearsed late into the evening. Trax AV of Clearfield, contracted by BYU, had rigged temporary lights, some of them in the attic.
One energized 300-watt lamp ended up on a wooden speaker box in the attic, despite packaging that warned against flammable materials within 12 inches of the bulb. It stayed there, drawing power, heating wood.
The timeline the fire report assembled is the part that stays with you:
- ~9:30 p.m. — a camera operator smells smoke. He and a colleague attribute it to hot stage lights.
- Overnight — several people involved in the production wonder whether the attic lamps were pulled. None of them asks the technician, and none of them goes up to look.
- ~1:00 a.m. — a courier delivering blood products drives past and sees what he later describes as fog at the east end of the building. It strikes him as odd, because there is no fog anywhere else. He does not report it.
- ~1:10 a.m. — a security guard hears an alarm but does not recognize it as a fire alarm.
- 2:43 a.m. — dispatch is called.
By the time crews were fighting it, it was a four-alarm fire, and the interior was gone. The loss was estimated at $15 million.
The fire marshal's report named the contributing conditions plainly: no sprinkler system, inadequate detection and notification, the extra fuel load the production set had brought in, and human error. And it recorded something more uncomfortable — the alarm system had produced so many false alarms, most often from the northwest turret and the attic, that the building's coordinators had developed what investigators called apathy toward it.
That is the real lesson of the Provo Tabernacle fire, and it has nothing to do with lighting rigs. An alarm that cries wolf is worse than no alarm, because it trains the people responsible for the building to ignore the one night it is telling the truth.
About that painting
Here is the story almost everyone in Utah Valley has heard: they pulled a painting of Christ out of the ruins, and everything around the figure had burned away while the Savior remained untouched.
The photographs are real. The chronology is not what people think.
What hung just inside the east front door was a giclée print of Harry Anderson's "The Second Coming." On Friday — the day of the fire — firefighters photographed it essentially undamaged, and that photo was carried out of the building. It was the following day that the picture became famous, after officials entered the tower area and found that the print had blackened everywhere except the exact outline of the figure of Christ. The Daily Herald's contemporaneous account is explicit that the piece charred slowly through Friday night or Saturday from residual heat, in a building crews could not fully cool until Saturday afternoon. It was carried out at about 4:15 p.m. on Saturday, December 18.
So the object survived the fire intact, then partially burned afterward, in a pattern that left the central figure legible. Whatever anyone makes of that, it is a more interesting fact than the compressed version, and the compressed version is the one that has been repeated for fifteen years. It is the standing pattern with a place like this: the most-repeated fact is usually the oldest and softest one, and the primary source is sitting right there being more specific.
What the fire uncovered
The salvage work produced something that would never have existed otherwise.
The archive of details. Between December 2010 and May 2011, according to Church History Department curator Emily Utt, at least 150 tons of debris were sorted and reviewed, with each salvaged fragment documented by its position in a grid like an archaeology dig. The fragments became models for the reconstruction rather than pieces to reinstall.
What physically made it back inside is thinner than people assume. The underpinning contractor's project page says a four-inch hand-carved piece of the podium remains in the temple's chapel, while the Church History Department's exhibit says the pulpit was salvaged, restored and returned to the chapel, and the original foundation stone was donated to the City of Provo rather than landfilled.
The engineering, which is the remarkable part
On October 1, 2011, President Thomas S. Monson announced at General Conference that the shell would be preserved and the building rebuilt as a temple. Ground was broken on May 12, 2012.
A temple needs far more space than a tabernacle: a baptistry, ordinance rooms, sealing rooms, support areas. There was no room for that inside the footprint, and the footprint was the one thing that had to be kept. So the answer was to put it underneath.
The sequence:
- Stabilize the shell. Crews removed two of the five interior wythes of brick, about 8 inches, and replaced them with reinforced shotcrete shear walls against the inside face of the brick.
- Take the weight off the ground. The original foundation, about five feet deep, came out. Twin steel "needle" beams were installed through the wall at 56 locations, carried on micropiles and preloaded with hydraulic jacks.
- Dig. The underpinning contractor puts the excavation at 25,000 cubic yards; the structural engineers' account says 30,000. The site sits on alluvial sands and gravels over very sensitive lake clay with a water table nearly 20 feet down, so the work needed a 710-foot-long, 53-foot-deep cutoff wall around the footprint to keep the surrounding ground from settling.
- Build a new building underneath the old one — two basement levels — then set the historic skin back down on it.
The shell stood on that temporary support for months while the new levels went in underneath.
Numbers that depend on who is counting. The underpinning contractor counts 140 temporary 12-inch micropiles drilled to 90 feet for the lift itself. The structural engineers' account describes excavation 25 feet below grade across most of the site and 40 feet for a smaller area. Anyone quoting one number as the number is quoting part of a fact.
One nice civic footnote: the limestone from the original foundation was not landfilled. It was donated to the City of Provo.
The dedication
The open house ran January 15 to March 5, 2016 and drew more than 800,000 visitors.
The building was dedicated in three sessions on Sunday, March 20, 2016. Elder Dallin H. Oaks led the first two, and President Russell M. Nelson, then president of the Quorum of the Twelve, presided over the third.
The date did a lot of work:
- It was Palm Sunday.
- The building became the 150th temple dedicated by the Church, the 16th in Utah and the second in Provo.
At 85,084 square feet and 150 feet tall, with four corner towers and the restored center tower, it is a considerably larger building than the one that burned — most of it underground.
What you can do there today
The grounds are open to everyone. They are free, they are landscaped, and along with Center Street they are the most photographed block downtown. Wedding parties use them constantly; so does anyone with a camera at dusk.
The interior is not a public building. Entry is limited to members of the church with a current temple recommend. If you are visiting Utah Valley and want to understand what a temple is and what the etiquette is around one, our temple visitor guide covers the whole valley, and the MTC visitor guide covers the other building tourists most often wonder about.
Getting there. It sits at University Avenue and Center Street, which is the origin point of Provo's entire address grid — the reason the city has no downtown Main Street is explained on our University Avenue page. UVX bus rapid transit stops within a block, and there is underground parking off Center Street.
The other temple, and why the count is confusing
Provo has two temples, and right now only one of them is open.
The first, dedicated on February 9, 1972, by President Joseph Fielding Smith, with President Harold B. Lee reading the dedicatory prayer, sits on the bench near the mouth of Rock Canyon, above BYU and the Missionary Training Center.
On October 3, 2021, President Russell M. Nelson announced it would be rebuilt. It was renamed the Provo Utah Rock Canyon Temple on February 20, 2024, and closed four days later, on February 24, 2024. It has been a construction site since, and our explainer on the new Provo temple covers the rebuild, the design and the preservation petition. As of October 2026, no open house or rededication date had been announced; the church's Newsroom maintains the current list of open house and dedication dates, and that is the only place worth checking.
Which means that for the past two and a half years, the building downtown — the one that started as a meetinghouse, burned to a shell, and spent a winter in the air on steel legs — has been the only operating temple in the city of Provo.
The short version
Provo built a tabernacle in the 1880s and did not finish it until 1898. It ran as a community gathering place for more than a century.
On December 17, 2010, it burned because a 300-watt lamp was left on a wooden speaker box in the attic, and because a fire alarm that had cried wolf too many times was not believed. The interior was a total loss.
Ten months later the church announced it would come back as a temple. Engineers transferred the surviving brick walls onto steel needle beams and dug new basement levels underneath them. Craftsmen copied details from fragments recovered out of at least 150 tons of debris.
It was dedicated on Palm Sunday in 2016. And the famous photograph of the surviving painting is not quite the photograph people think it is — which, in a town this well documented, is usually the case.
For the other great Utah Valley building that did not get a second life, see Geneva Steel.
Related Guides
- Visiting Provo's Temples: Grounds, Schedules and Closures — visiting the building the shell became
- Utah Valley Temple Open Houses and Dedications
- Temple Visitor Guide for Utah Valley
- Geneva Steel: A History
Frequently Asked Questions
What caused the Provo Tabernacle fire?
When did the Provo Tabernacle burn down?
Did a painting of Jesus really survive the Provo Tabernacle fire?
What was saved from the tabernacle?
When was the Provo City Center Temple announced and dedicated?
How did they build a basement under a building that was already standing?
Can I go inside the Provo City Center Temple?
How many temples are in Provo right now?
Sources
The facts in this guide were checked against these sources. Hours, fees and rules change, so confirm anything time-sensitive with the source before you go. How we make Provo.com.
- Provo Tabernacle (Historical Places), Provo City Library. Checked October 12, 2026.
- Provo Tabernacle, National Register nomination, National Park Service. Checked October 19, 2026.
- Fire devastates historic Provo Tabernacle, Church News. Checked October 12, 2026.
- Provo City Center Temple (almanac), Church News. Checked October 12, 2026.
- Provo Utah Rock Canyon Temple (almanac), Church News. Checked October 12, 2026.
- Provo City Center Temple Open House, Church Newsroom. Checked October 12, 2026.
- This Debris Matters (thesis, ch. 4), Emily Utt / Church of Jesus Christ. Checked October 12, 2026.
- Provo City Center Temple exhibit, Church History Department. Checked October 19, 2026.
- Provo City Center Temple (project), Nicholson Construction. Checked October 12, 2026.
- Historic Renovation of the Provo Tabernacle, STRUCTURE magazine. Checked October 12, 2026.
- Report: Light fixture, human errors caused Provo Tabernacle fire, KSL.com. Checked October 12, 2026.
- Report: Lamp started massive Provo Tabernacle fire, Deseret News. Checked October 12, 2026.
- Scorched portrait of Christ saved from tabernacle, Daily Herald. Checked October 12, 2026.
