Steeling myself as I drove along Highland Drive in Salt Lake City, I noticed the new street sign: Meeting House Court. To the north, a dental office promised smiles, and to the south, a housing development was under construction. However, I only saw what wasn’t there.

The red brick church that no longer exists was built in the early 1900s. During the Great Depression, nearby residents sacrificed funds and gave their labor to build expansions for their growing congregation, called Winder Ward. The canal out back once transported quarried stone from Little Cottonwood Canyon to the Salt Lake Temple site.

Stories we hand down about historic buildings such as this one, true or otherwise, can shape generations. Demolishing the structures, even for seemingly justifiable reasons, silences whispers from the past.

But while preservation is usually seen as ideal, destruction can clear space for an unexpected path to stability. I would know, because that church was a piece of my heritage — our family’s business.

Looking back now, I understand that losing the business — first legally and later structurally — reinforced my quest for a stable adulthood. That unfolded differently than I initially had planned: My husband and I have raised four children on five continents, cultivating roots and fertilizing lives with soil from each place we lived. While I never recovered what was lost as a child, through intentional and cyclical repotting since, I have created space for deeper growth. Perhaps we can find that space only once our past has been cleared.

In 2019, a document outlining plans to replace the old community landmark with 38 multifamily units declared that the building had come “to the end of its usable life.” People who cherished memories there and understood its historic value mounted opposition, but the demolition was approved and executed. For my family, though, it had been obliterated 40 years prior.

Dad had bought the old church in the late 1970s after it sat vacant for several months. When he was closing on a duplex on the west side of town, he asked the seller about anything else worth buying. “There’s an old church on Highland Drive,” the man said. “Winder Ward. It’ll likely need to be torn down, but the location is worth something.”

After purchasing it the very next day, he and Mom sat many nights on its sculpted wooden pews, under the dusty pipe organ and chandeliers, and dreamed. Dad believed it could continue to offer something beautiful for the community and should be preserved. The Old Meeting House was born as a wedding reception and public event center — first in his mind and then on paper — with a name that paid tribute to its history. I sat in piles of sawdust in the basement as Dad breathed life into the chapel, multipurpose areas and classrooms. He sanded its wooden floors by hand.

For several years, the place united brides and grooms, colleagues and families, and molded memories. At events, after ensuring knives faced plates, I would sneak almond lace cookie cups from the kitchen, their buttery bits dissolving slowly on my tongue.

I didn’t realize that life as I knew it would likewise soon dissolve.

What happened to The Old Meeting House?

The methodical process of demolition is faster than building, but it still requires permits, site visits, utility disconnection, salvaging reusable items, heavy machinery, dust management, inspections and debris cleanup. Once all of that is done, though, there is a toll: Razing historic buildings like this one destroys the physicality of its connected cultural heritage. Who hasn’t silently mourned the loss of an elementary school, a corner shop or a playground — places where you might have learned how to say “I’m sorry” or the value of a dollar?

My family’s collapse was similar, but it started brick by red brick, until the shrapnel pierced too deep to repair. Today’s graded surface, cordoned off by orange mesh, bears the gaping scar of the resulting legal battle that took the business from my parents. We pieced together fragments of our pulverized lives, but we never recovered from the blast, either financially or emotionally.

Over the past four decades, a different family has run The Old Meeting House, orchestrating some 6,000 events there. They have surely handed down another version of its story, one that speaks to their own history. Debris settles on both, burying what once was.

Yet it’s clear that while preservation is often ideal, it isn’t always possible. Bringing an old building into compliance with current safety and seismic standards requires prohibitively expensive upgrades while maintaining architectural integrity. It was said that it would take $1 million to get The Old Meeting House — built on a fault line — up to code. The conditional use permit request declared that it was a “liability to its current owner,” a “hazard to public safety” and had “outlived its economic use.”

Perhaps that’s true. Certainly, a multi-family complex may help to alleviate the alarming local housing shortage. But costs of demolition are high, too, and they can’t be measured in purely economic terms.

New construction is pictured in October of 2024 at the former site of The Old Meeting House in Salt Lake City, previously Winder Ward. | A. Griffith

Choosing to repurpose, not destroy

As city officials balance growth and modernization with preservation — especially as Salt Lake City prepares to host the 2034 Olympic Winter Games — they must consider the environmental and community impact of tearing down our heritage. For many buildings, preservation is possible.

Standing a few miles to the north of The Old Meeting House site is the Sprague Library, an English Tudor-style building that opened in 1928. During renovations from a 2017 basement flood, its historic charm was showcased, and it now serves a diverse community as a modern library.

A larger example of repurposing is the Joseph Smith Memorial Building downtown. Currently undergoing extensive additional renovations and upgrades, the former Hotel Utah (1911-1987) has used displays, plaques, photos and guided tours to help visitors connect with its history. Dad’s stories about his work as a teenage busboy there, combined with the many times I’ve visited, helped me appreciate its prominence in the community.

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When we tear down historic buildings, who tells their stories, especially after those who remember them pass away? Must we forget, or can we hold on?

The owners at Meeting House Court reportedly plan to erect a historic marker in the condominium courtyard, using bricks from The Old Meeting House in the walkway. My father, who played an integral role in saving the building and creating the business that went on to serve the community for decades, likely won’t be listed. Some stories are truly buried.

Perhaps, though, the marker will stand as a silent spur for those who walk the red bricks to not only preserve the stories that shaped them but to make room for new ones. Named or unnamed, the space created inside of us — cultivated with unanticipated soils — can honor the past while cementing future pathways.

Gretel Backman Patch, from Salt Lake City and St. George, is writing her first book, a memoir about creating home literally anywhere. Alongside her husband, she has mothered their four children in places that include Djibouti, Australia, Nepal, India and Germany. She currently lives in Saudi Arabia.

Gretel Backman Patch | Ben Edwards
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