What is surely Salt Lake City’s most offbeat and curious public park is celebrating its first quarter century.
Welcome to Salt Lake City’s weirdest city park, now 25 years old.
What is surely Salt Lake City’s most offbeat and curious public park is celebrating its first quarter century.
Saved from impending development, Gilgal Sculpture Garden is now a well-manicured sanctuary filled with native plants and the eccentric sculptured rock slabs and giant boulders of Thomas Battersby Child Jr., a Latter-day Saint stonemason who died in 1963.
For many devotees who gathered at a celebration there Sunday, the 3-acre park set deep into the block at 749 E. 500 South is also miraculous — both for its peculiar art and for the partnerships and community devotion that led to it being preserved.
There’s a new push with its 25th anniversary to have Gilgal designated both a city and a federal landmark.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) An installation known as “The Sphinx” in Gilgal Sculpture Garden in Salt Lake City.
“So many different people can find something here that speaks to them, whether it’s strictly from an artistic or religious perspective, a little oasis tucked in the city, a hidden garden, the rocks themselves — there’s just something here,” said Lisa Thompson, who spoke as a longtime Friends of Gilgal Garden board member.
Thompson said it’s a “miracle” the garden survived and lived on as a city park.
Child is said to have created it as a retreat from the world and as a tribute to his own faith, as well as a place to inspire viewers to ponder “the unsolved mysteries of life” and struggle to find their own answers, according to the site’s official website.
“You may think I’m a nut,” he is quoted as saying, “but I hope I’ve aroused your thinking and curiosity.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) A self-portrait of Thomas Battersby Child Jr., called “The Monument to The Trade,” at the artist’s Gilgal Sculpture Garden in Salt Lake City.
Another leader of Friends of Gilgal Gardens, a nonprofit group that continues to curate, support and maintain the garden alongside Salt Lake City Public Lands Department crews, called it “a step back in time.”
A city park since 2000, Gilgal is free and open to the public seven days a week.
It was Child’s backyard at one time, a place where the masonry contractor, at age 57, launched into creating 12 distinct sculptures and more than 70 stones engraved with religious quotes, poetry, aphorisms and literary texts, many drawn from the Bible and holy scriptures of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Some of the flat stones affixed with literary text and religious quotes in Gilgal Sculpture Garden in Salt Lake City.
Child and his crews scoured the Wasatch canyons for many of the colorful, turbulent and immense stones he used as his palette. Often with his own special tools and techniques — including a blowtorch — he carved them on-site into dramatic figures and landscape features arranged along the garden’s arcing path. The art installations have names such as The Altar, Captain of The Lord’s Host, Elijah’s Cave and Daniel II: King Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream.
Gilgal might be best known for a sphinx-like statue featuring what is thought to be the face of church founder Joseph Smith. Child also left a statue of himself under a large and intricate stone enclosure, surrounded by his hand tools and wearing brick checkered pants.
While Latter-day Saint illustrators of that 1950s era depicted events from the Bible and Book of Mormon in a literal and realistic style, said Laura Howe, an art curator with the Church History Museum, “Child reminds us that they were phenomenal, marvelous, miraculous.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) A feature called “Malachi” at Gilgal Sculpture Garden in Salt Lake City.
The site fell into disrepair and overgrowth in the decades after his death, known to a few “sneakers” who would steal into the garden along a thin hidden path to gawk and marvel before it became a public site.
Rick Graham, former director of Salt Lake City parks, confessed to being a sneaker in his day. Introduced to it as a teenager, Graham said he and friends “thought this is a pretty spooky and weird place.”
In his stint with the city, Graham and others in attendance Sunday were also part of a widely based and hard-fought community fundraising drive to purchase and save the park amid talk in the late 1990s of selling the site for a condominium development.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) A sculpture called “The Monument to The Priesthood” at Gilgal Sculpture Garden in Salt Lake City.
After that purchase in 2000 and a complex land transfer to the city, the park and its sculptures were extensively restored, in what several at the celebration called an enduring gift to current and future residents.
Graham pointed to a plaque in the garden featuring words from Child and his wife, Bertha: “Thanks to all who have contributed to our happiness.”
“Look at the happiness it encourages,” he observed to fellow devotees, “for the Salt Lake community.”
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