Preserving Salt Lake City's Fisher Mansion 

• Derek Carlisle

There is sweet irony in the transition of Utah's largest and most enduring brewery into a convent and, later, an alcohol and drug abuse treatment center for men. And there is still some irony in the fact that Salt Lake City wants to preserve it.

You have to have a lot of imagination to see a future for the Fisher Mansion—the bleak, solitary and boarded-up structure that looks south onto a busy Interstate 80 and sits anachronistically next to a working power plant. But Salt Lake City is aspirational, calling the historic space an "opportunity for recreation and education on the Jordan River."

The transformation could happen, but not necessarily because of the Fisher Mansion's historic roots. Salt Lake, and Utah in general, have been unpredictable when it comes to preserving the past through historic buildings. What we decide to hold onto and what we let go of is a story of competing values and needs.

• Library of Congress
• “A good building merits something more than the routine account when the death knell is sounded,” Salt Lake Tribune writer Robert Woody penned in a 1964 “wake” for the Dooly Building.

The iconic Salt Lake City and County Building on State Street stands today because of a contentious vote by the city council. But the Utah Theater on Main Street was defeated and demolished after a court battle. The Dooly Building from 1892—one of only four buildings in the West designed by famed architect Louis Sullivan—was demolished in 1964. And the list goes on.

"We can't cling to all the stuff that people did in the 19th or 20th centuries, even if it survived for a couple hundred years," says Brenda Scheer, past chair of the Salt Lake City Planning Commission and a past dean of the University of Utah's College of Architecture and Planning. "You [have to] ask the question, 'Was it precious in its own time?' Are there stories that support that? Is it a monument?'"

• Kathy Biele
• Salt Lake City plans to convert Poplar Grove’s Fisher Mansion into a community and recreation hub along the Jordan River Parkway.

Pour One Out
Scheer believes restoring the Fisher Mansion is definitely one of the things Salt Lake City should do. "There's a lot of history there," she said. "It's in a place where people don't expect a house to be—and it's not an interesting house [for its time]. But it's a cultural touchstone and on the west side, where we don't have a lot."

Not everyone agrees. One comment on the city site sums up much of the opposition to historic preservation. "It looks like it was a cool house in its day. But, due to the location and high risk for theft, graffiti, damage and future potential earthquake damage, why not just take some of the historic things out of it and tear it down?"

The Fisher has had its share of problems. The mansion was built in 1893 by Albert Fisher, a German immigrant who wanted to live close to his work. "The two-story, twelve-room house, designed in the Victorian eclectic style, stood a stone's throw from what eventually became the largest brewery in Utah, the A. Fisher Brewing Co.," notes a history of the building on MappingSLC.org. The brewery was even bigger than Coors at one point and was the only brewery in Utah to reopen after the end of Prohibition.

No surprise, but Fisher had to deal with morality laws in Utah, and the predominant religion. One of his ads read: "Beer drinking people are a home-loving, moral people." Whether or not Latter-day Saints bought the message, they bought the beer.

While the brewing business closed from 1918 to 1933, it would reopen until 1957, when it was bought out by Lucky Lager. In 1945, the mansion was reportedly leased to the Catholic Church to serve as a convent—brewing continued in the industrial spaces nearby—and later in 1970 the mansion became St. Mary's Home for Men, an addiction treatment facility.

Utah has a capricious reputation for preservation and destruction, and much of this depends on the activists at work.

"You need the right kind of approach," says Kirk Huffaker, a consultant and architectural historian and former executive director of the Utah Heritage Foundation, now Preservation Utah. "You need the right relationships in the community to strengthen your approach and the right tools to provide incentives for regulatory tools that convince people that it's worth another look."

• Courtesy Photo
• “Ultimately, the city is in the hands of developers. Developers can either wipe away history through outright demolition, or they can be critical champions for history by making room for the past while meeting future needs.”—David Amott, Preservation Utah’s executive director.

It's not an easy task because preservationists are often up against powerful development companies or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the largest property owners in the city and state. And it's made more difficult by the Utah Legislature's deference to private property rights—if you own a property, you can mostly do what you want with it.

"I'm enthusiastic—and very sad," says David Amott, Preservation Utah's executive director. "Ultimately, the city is in the hands of developers. Developers can either wipe away history through outright demolition, or they can be critical champions for history by making room for the past while meeting future needs."

That said, advocates have to work for what they want—and still may not get it.

Take the Utah Theater, for instance. It was built in 1919 as the Pantages Theater, where vaudeville would be performed. Renamed the Utah Theater in 1935, "it was one of downtown Salt Lake's great movie palaces with a seating capacity of 1,823," according to Cinema Treasures.

• Preservation Utah
• The Ogden Latter-day Saints Temple was replaced with a more traditional building.

Then, in 1968, the owners decided to convert the balcony into another auditorium, destroying most of the elaborate ornamentation. Throughout multiple sales to new owners, there were always plans to renovate. It never happened.

"People hadn't been in it since the early '90s," said Amott. "The plaster was chipped, only the ceiling was left. It was a fragmented building on many levels."

In 2019, the Save the Utah Theater group formed, motivating a surprising public response.

"You had this palace of the sort you would never see today," says Amott. But it was mostly a figment of the imagination by then. Demolition began in April.

• Preservation Utah
• A spaceship? A cloud? A cupcake? The Provo Latter-day Saints Temple invites many comparisons and is set to be replaced.

Amott wanted to save the original Provo Temple in Utah County—the one that looks like a birthday cake or a spaceship but will soon be replaced with a more traditional design. The similarly designed Ogden Temple was demolished even earlier as the church began moving away from modernist architecture.

"By and large, I don't see that people responded," Amott said. "There was a lack of decoration and lack of the human hand shaping the interior. It was interesting, but not what people cry for. They want a building that tells a story."

You could probably fill a notebook with all the spaceship-spired architecture that has failed in Utah. The Centre Theater at 299 S. State was one. It opened in 1937 and was hailed as one of Salt Lake's finest examples of Art Deco architecture. That lasted until 1989, when a nondescript office tower took its place.

• Preservation Utah
• Built in 1937, the Centre Theater on State Street made way for an office tower in 1989.

Win Some Lose Some
Even if a building is important, it may not stand the test of time. "They're shocking to tear down ... and it makes people really angry," Scheer said. "You can walk up to a building and touch it—like a person 200 years ago touched it."

But times have changed. The internet has made us think differently. "We feel like everything is new every day. We don't even cherish things," she said.

There have been truly historic losses in Utah, too. The Dooly Building was one. Built in 1892, it was one of only four such buildings out west designed by famed architect Louis Sullivan. Richard Kletting—who also designed the Fisher Mansion and Utah State Capitol—drew up the construction documents for the building. The Historic American Buildings Survey called it Sullivan's best work in the West.

In 1964, Salt Lake Tribune columnist Robert Woody wrote a "wake" in anticipation of the Dooly's demolition. "A good building merits something more than the routine account when the death knell is sounded," Woody wrote.

Chicago photographer Richard Nickel waged a campaign to save the building. "How many buildings of equal architectural merit do you have in Salt Lake City?" he wrote to then-Mayor J. Bracken Lee. "Instead of being proud of this building, you ignore it. Instead of offering tax relief to the owner, or cleaning the neighborhood up, the city government is silent." His words fell on deaf ears.

• Kathy Biele
• The Hyrum Jensen mansion in Sugar House was spared from demolition during construction of the nearby Deseret Industries.

Sometimes, though, advocacy works. Deseret Industries on 2100 South now stands where Circuit City—the bankrupt former electronics industry leader—once did. No, Circuit City was not archetypal by any means, unless you're talking about the recurring box theme. But next to it stood the two-story Hyrum Jensen mansion. After Sugar House experienced years of angst over stalled development in the "sugar hole," the city planning commission wanted to save something—anything—with historic character.

There was a story to be told there. Jensen—called "the polygamist who settled Fairmont" by the Deseret News—owned much of the land between 700 East and Highland Drive from 2100 South to 3300 South. He had been involved in the lumber trade and was a good friend of Brigham Young. Huffaker, of Preservation Utah, wanted the church and the planning commission to know what might be lost with the plan to put a Deseret Industries drive-thru where the mansion stood.

Community advocates responded. "We believe that demolishing another small, historic building in Sugar House would be a significant loss to providing affordable space to businesses in a building that defines the historic character of the neighborhood," the Utah Heritage Foundation said in a news statement.

"When I heard about the plans, I thought it deserved a meeting to help them understand," Huffaker said. Ultimately, they offered a conditional permit to the church, which agreed to reconfigure the D.I. building and scrap plans to just move the Jensen mansion somewhere else.

"We're supposed to improve the character of the area," then-Planning Commissioner Susie McHugh told the Deseret News. "I don't see how removing the house ... improves the looks."

• Kathy Biele
• Odd Fellows Hall was preserved by relocating the entire building to a new location.

Still, it was not unheard of to spare historic buildings by moving them. When officials wanted to clear the way for a new courthouse, the Odd Fellows Hall stood in the way. The ornate Richardsonian Romanesque structure was home to a benevolent and secretive society not unlike the Masons. To avoid demolition, they just moved the building across the street to 26 W. Market St.

Of all the stories about near-losses, perhaps the most interesting and significant involves the City and County Building on Salt Lake's Washington Square. Siting of the building began amid intense religious conflicts between the anti-Mormon Liberal Party and the church's People's Party, according to the Utah Division of State History.

When the cornerstone was laid in 1892, a crowd of predominantly non-Mormons reportedly cheered and called for a new era of secular politics.

The Romanesque structure features a 256-foot clock tower topped with the statue Columbia, which in 2000 was unceremoniously crowned with a pumpkin. Over the years, the sandstone exterior began to deteriorate, and earthquakes only made things worse.

It was during then-Mayor Ted Wilson's administration that a serious discussion of the future started because, of course, the cost of preservation would be substantial. "I could have let it go," then-City Councilwoman Sydney Fonnesbeck told the Deseret News. "But I'm a real believer that the real fabric of a city is made up of the past, present and future."

Former Mayor Palmer DePaulis was Wilson's director of public works when the discussions began on whether to save the building that once served as the Utah State Capitol and, until the 1980s, shared space with the Salt Lake County government.

In a recent interview, DePaulis told Salt Lake City Weekly that it was important for the voting public to weigh in on the building's preservation.

"I decided to go ahead with a general obligation bond, which required a vote," DePaulis said. "I wanted to make sure that the decision to restore the building and save it was made by the people of Salt Lake to cement their buy-in and affirm their interest in saving this landmark building. They came through with a positive vote, and the rest is history, as they say."

But it was close. The council voted 5-2 to fund the restoration that was completed in 1989 with a seismic upgrade.

It underwent a second, $10 million renovation in 2018.

It is by will and public pressure that some history is being saved. "There's been a lot of loss," Scheer said. "We're just building stuff, but there will come a time when we won't be building anything and when we tear down the stuff the previous people built. All that is solid melts into air."

But for the Fisher Mansion, there's an air of hope. While the plans are new, especially for the west side, the resurgence of Fisher Brewing and recent beer gardens hosted at the Fisher Mansion site brings the historic building full circle.