Provo City Center Temple

The Provo City Center Temple is one of the more unusual buildings in Utah — a reconstructed LDS temple inside the preserved shell of the 1898 Provo Tabernacle, which was gutted by fire in 2010. The Tabernacle's Romanesque exterior walls were retained, and an entirely new temple was built within them, reopening in 2016. The result is a building with a 19th-century brick and stone exterior containing a 21st-century sacred interior.

The temple grounds are open to the public; the interior is accessible only to church members in good standing. The exterior and the small plaza around it are worth seeing for the architecture and the interesting history of how the building was saved.

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A story
The Provo City Center Temple was rebuilt from the ruins of the Provo Tabernacle, a historic Mormon meetinghouse that burned to the ground in 2010. The fire gutted the interior completely while leaving the brick exterior walls standing. Rather than demolish it, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints decided to rebuild a temple inside the surviving shell — an unusual preservation approach that saved an 1898 landmark by transforming its purpose entirely.

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