I found out from a relative that my childhood ward building, where I grew up going to church, is being shut down and sold. The reason is lack of attendance. There used to be three wards in that building.

It is a little bittersweet. I am very happy that the church is shrinking in that area, but my parents helped build the building and I have some good memories (mostly of playing basketball in the gym). I also have bad memories of being told I was going to hell as a gay kid in seminary.

I hope this is occurring everywhere.

I spent about a good nine months to a year of helping build the new ward chapel when I was a young teen. Dad was the bishop. Evenings and Saturdays during school year and full time in the summer I was digging and shingling and putting up insulation and whatever. I sort of resented it but I worked hard. That was a long long time ago. When I visit the old town where I grew up, the ward building holds a lot of memories good and bad but mostly of boring meetings. It would be very odd to see it gone--I know what you mean.

At the time the church provided a building contractor who lived in a trailer with his wife. They sent work missionaries as well to do the brick work. The ward members did most of it.

One of the work missionaries used to taunt me as he could tell I was gay even though I was doing my best to hide it. No one ever said anything to him. I can't explain how mortified I was but that feeling pushes me harder to be vocal about how the Mormon church treats the gay kids still. Only difference is they pretend to comfort you now as they twist the knife in your back.


Unfortunately, the wards using the building are still going gangbusters. I come from the most Mormon county in the state and it is still carrying the torch. And its still one of the last places you want to be Mormon and gay.

I am sorry you went through that. The Mormon church really is a cruel joke.

I also have a lot of fond memories of when we were building our new chapel/stake center when I was a kid. We had a printout of a song, "Have You Done Any Work on the Church This Week?" pasted into the front of the hymnals, that one of our members wrote to the tune of "Have I done any good..." We had a building missionary who was the project manager and yes, they had subcontractors. But there was so much work the members did. We'd go up in the afternoons and the kids would clean up. I was with my mother in the little sacrament prep room off the podium and she was staining the cabinets and I was handing her stuff. The door was almost clothes and my mother got light headed and almost passed out. Everytime I sit in the building I look at that room and remember that.

But mostly, we were out in the desert that had canyons nearby with nice rocks. We actually made trips out there as a ward, would roast hot dogs and collect rocks in a trailer. Those rocks built the front ceiling part over the podium and our steeple, which is so unique. When TSCC started putting those Christian-looking plastic steeples on churches I thought that if they had torn down our rock steeple and put one of those on, I'd be making a public spectacle of it. Fortunately, the next time I went to California it was still there. I don't have a lot of good childhood memories so I'm pretty protective of the ones I do have.

My dad was a HVAC guy, long before they used that name. When I was in about 10th grade, he was out of work and was newly TBM, so he volunteered to go work on a new chapel being built in Sandy, in our stake boundaries. This was about 1965.

I don't remember all the details but it wasn't long that he'd been hired to work on the chapel, for what I understood was decent money. There was a supervisor, who was there with his wife to build the chapel (she always offered up some good cookies for the working guys). He was in his 70's by then so I don't think he worked too hard.

My dad ended up doing much of the work. There were work missionaries that were there to help, and they came to dinner more than once on a Sunday.

Of course, being Priest age, I ended up helping him with whatever he was doing and lots of guys in the ward (and stake) helped out a lot. I also was there one evening doing something and stepped on a nail, which barely missed going in my heel--it kind of did a slice job on the side of my foot. Hurt like hell, but could have been much worse.

When I moved back to Utah in 2015, I drove by this chapel (and many other places that I hadn't seen in many years) and was glad to see it still standing. It looked like it was well maintained, unlike some of them of that era. I spent some quality time with my dad in the couple of years that we worked there which I realized later probably was a good thing.

I drove past a fine old Methodist church in my town yesterday, that was sold to a developer after the congregation dwindled to approximately nothing, and has been converted to expensive condo units because the RE market here is booming. What will happen with your sold-off old ward building, I wonder?

Probably housing. The real estate market is booming there too.

The only time I showed up to work on a ward building project (Scotch Plains, NJ, 1970-71), the job I was given was to spend a few hours breaking up a cement pathway that had been incorrectly placed or poured, I don't recall being told which it was. So all I've ever done in this regard is tear down!

Same thing in politics. I volunteered one afternoon to help my high school friend's dad's run for mayor of Las Vegas. But the only thing they needed done right then, by someone with a car, was to take down a whole bunch of posters that had been illegally stapled onto public utility poles.

So I'm proven to have been both religiously and politically destructive.

Lol... cool

The old building I went to as a child was built long before I was born and was a red brick two story stately building. The chapel ceiling was perhaps 16 feet above the wooden pews. I have many memories of that building, some good, some bad. It was torn down around 1970 and a new meeting house was erected in it's place. I was a teenager when it was demolished and watched with sadness as it disappeared into a rubble pile that was hauled away. The new building was a clone of thousands of other mormon buildings, bland and boring. I kinda miss the old building.

edited to include; my old ward building was the Taylor Ward building if anyone reading this remembers that magnificent old building.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/06/2017 03:43PM by sunbeep.

There is a important correlation between the old individual buildings with style and the old Stakes that had their own flavor. Now, every building is one of three cookie cutter plans from Salt Lake and every lesson manual is the same church wide.
When the church realized in 1969 they had been caught red handed with "translation" of the book of Abraham , they decided to make it near impossible for a Sunday School teacher to bring in outside material( teach only from the manual) , and about the same time the church architecture department robbed the soul of every local -- demolishing or selling most of the nice old buildings.

I just heard that my childhood chapel is being shut down too. I remember attending the dedication service as a young boy.

According to my TBM brother, they're going to shutter the building for two years to see if they need it in the future (fat chance of that). If they don't reopen it, there are going to bulldoze the building and sell the land. Apparently, they can't stand the idea of some kind of "unsavory" business using the building.

Mine was torn down and a huge apartment building is being built where it stood.

The Las Vegas 2nd ward building land is now under the freeway to Henderson. I can't remembers if they sold items from the building as souvenirs, or just let you come and take stuff. If it was free, I bet a lot of the pews went up in smoke in fire places, and smelled of fart.

Nothing would make me happier than to have my childhood ward buildings torn down. I went back to one after about a decade and it was a trip, the same adults were walking around as if i had never left. Like watching a twilight zone ghost movie.