Salt Lake City's unique Gilgal Sculpture Garden could become a landmark

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Salt Lake City seeks to designate Gilgal Sculpture Garden as a protected landmark.
• The garden features religious sculptures by Thomas Child, created from 1945 to 1963.
• Landmark status would ensure preservation, requiring city review for any modifications.

SALT LAKE CITY — Gilgal Sculpture Garden isn't Salt Lake City's largest park, nor is it the city's most popular or highest reviewed.

It's essentially a large backyard in the middle of the East Central City neighborhood, but what's located within the space at 749 E. 500 South has made it, as one person put it on Google Reviews, "surprisingly fascinating."

It's undeniably unique, serving as an outdoor art museum of sorts. The 3-acre lot is filled with a dozen religiously inspired sculptures and more than 70 engraved stones, crafted by the lot's one-time owner, Thomas Child.

Salt Lake City is now seeking to preserve Child's work, initiating a process to put the park on the city's list of protected landmark sites. Its request will go through a public process, beginning with a presentation in front of the city's Historic Landmark Commission on Thursday, Aug. 6.

"This is a site that has exceptional importance to the city, has exceptional importance to the state, region and even the nation," Lex Traughber, a senior planner for Salt Lake City, told KSL. "It imparts high artistic, historic and cultural values for our community, and that's why it's important to preserve this."

Gilgal Garden's story starts in 1945. Child, who was 57 at the time, was not a trained or professional artist, but he was a well-respected masonry contractor and also bishop of his local congregation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

These influenced how he spent the remaining years of his life.

"If you want to be brought down to earth in your thinking and studying, try to make your thoughts express themselves with your hands," Child once wrote, as noted by Friends of Gilgal Garden, which compiled the park's history.

He went through "incredible lengths" to obtain boulders that he could use for his pieces, often hiring people with heavy equipment to extract the rocks he saw across the state and haul them to his yard, park historians said. He'd often use an oxyacetylene torch to then craft his religious- and literature-themed pieces, resulting in their "polished sheen."

Utah sculptor Maurice Brooks and Child's son-in-law, Bryant Higgs, assisted on many occasions. The name "Gilgal" was adopted from the Bible, referring to a circle of sacred stones retrieved from the Jordan River to memorialize a miraculous crossing, Judi Short, president of the Friends of Gilgal, told KSL in 2023.

Thousands of visitors viewed these pieces up until Child died in 1963, even though he acknowledged that the works may not always be well-received. He said his goal was to make visitors think and feel, which park historians say is essentially the meaning of Child's most-recognized piece, "The Sphinx."

The Friends of Gilgal Garden ultimately formed in 1997 to advocate its preservation amid encroaching development interests. The group secured major donations from the church's philanthropic arm, as well as Salt Lake County and other groups, to purchase the space in 2000, transferring the land over to Salt Lake City to become a public park.

The group has urged the city to add it to the city's list of local landmarks in recent years to protect it further.

Salt Lake City has over 100 protected landmarks, all of which have "historic, cultural, archaeological or architectural significance." Most of these are buildings, but there are sculptures and open spaces, including Sugar House Monument and Ensign Peak.

Gilgal Garden already stands out as the state's only "visionary art environment."

Unlike the National Register of Historic Places, which offers incentives to preserve history, a local landmark designation adds stronger protections. Under the proposal, the park would be given an additional historic preservation overlay, which forces any modifications to go through a city process to ensure that its history isn't lost.

"Any sort of alterations to the garden would require city review for historic appropriateness," Traughber explained. "It would also be difficult to demolish it."

The city has no intent to sell or alter Gilgal Garden, but adding landmark status would make it difficult for future city leaders to dismantle the site, he added.

It will go before the city's historic landmark and planning commissions for recommendations before the City Council decides whether to approve the consideration. Thursday's meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m. inside the Salt Lake City-County Building (451 S. State) to start the process.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Carter Williams

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Carter Williams is a reporter for KSL. He covers Salt Lake City, statewide transportation issues, outdoors, the environment and weather. He is a graduate of Southern Utah University.