The exterior of Memory Grove's Meditation Chapel, faced with pink Georgia marble and surrounded by landscaping and memorial markers, is impressive.
The interior, however, is stunning.Walk into the small building (16 feet by 20 feet) and you are immediately faced with a large marble bench. Go around the bench and you get the full effect of the chapel's four large stained-glass windows, the Francesca Falk Miller poem "Immortality" etched with gold leaf into the opposite wall, the blue and gold leaf textured ceiling, the marble floor.
"Incredible, isn't it?" said Memory Grove Foundation board member John Jansen, while showing around a visitor Monday.
Indeed. And now, after more than 20 years of being padlocked -- and after a $30,000 restoration effort -- the public can finally see the chapel for itself.
Originally dedicated on July 25, 1948, the chapel was conceived and financed by Mr. and Mrs. Ross Beason, whose only son, Lt. Ross Beason Jr., was killed April 15, 1944, when his fighter plane crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Italian coast.
The chapel was designed to commemorate Beason and all the other Utah soldiers killed during World War II whose bodies were never recovered. In the words of the inscription on the chapel's front, "those other sons of Utah who with him trod war's last mile."
For decades the chapel fulfilled its purpose, but by the 1970s vandalism and neglect had taken their toll. All the windows were broken -- some by bullets -- the floor was crumbling, the landscaping was running wild. The city finally just boarded up the place, and only now, after many months of restoration, can people re-enter and appreciate its original glory.
"The whole area is just wonderful," said Barbara Felt, whose only sibling, Lt. Paul Schenk Jr., is memorialized on a marker outside the chapel. "The chapel itself is so beautiful."
Schenk's is one of more than 300 granite markers around the chapel memorializing Utahns who were killed during the war and whose bodies were never found. His memorial stone was placed there relatively recently, when Felt found out about the restoration effort and wanted to put something there for him.
"It means so much -- I cannot tell you how much it means to me," she said. "This is something we've never had. He didn't have a gravestone anywhere, and now we have a place that we can go and be with Paul."
Strolling around reading the markers, one gets a picture of how things were back then. Most of the soldiers were in their early 20s when they died. Their deaths occurred all over the world, but, as might be expected for those whose remains were never recovered, the exact locations are often vague.
"Pacific area," one marker reads. "North American area," reads another. "Off Gilbert Islands," "Off coast of Dakar, Africa," "Bataan Death March."
"This place is amazing on Memorial Day," Jansen said. "There are flowers all around."
Each of the four stained-glass windows inside the chapel depict one of the armed forces branches: Army, Navy, Marines and Army Air Corps (the Air Force at that time was still part of the Army). It cost $10,000 to restore the windows, and another $7,000 to place two panes of impact-resistant polycarbonate between them and the outside world to protect them from rocks and, yes, bullets.
"We weren't going to go to all that work and have them exposed again," Jansen said.
Memory Grove is located east of the Capitol building, at the mouth of City Creek Canyon.
The chapel will be open to the public Wednesday from noon to 2 p.m. and every Wednesday thereafter through May, as well as Saturday, May 1, from 10 a.m. to noon. It will be open regularly from then on, though exact hours are not yet known.
Anyone interested can also call the Utah Heritage Foundation, 533-0858, to open it up at other times.
Those who would like to place a marker memorializing a loved one should call the Memory Grove Foundation at 566-4596.
Ironically, members of the Beason family have not taken any part in the chapel's restoration -- in fact, the Utah Heritage Foundation and Memory Grove Foundation don't even know where they are.
"We hear there are some in California," Jansen said. "It would be great if they heard about all this and contacted us so we could tell them what's going on."