Yesterday I was reminicing about the churches I knew and loved in Cambridge—stone chapels tucked into side streets or towering over intersections, the kind of places that hold memory simply by continuing to stand. Today I’m thinking about another piece of historic architecture much closer to home: the B’nai Israel Temple in Salt Lake City, where the Salt Lake Art Museum (SLAM) is beginning to take shape. I recently published an article about the building’s long history and its new institutional future. The thread between the two posts is preservation—how inherited spaces carry memory, and what it means when a community chooses to keep or discard the places that define it.
The Tragedy of the Pantages Theater
My interest in preservation became personal during the Utah Pantages Theatre debacle in 2021, when I researched, wrote, and anonymously published an article about the zero-dollar deal that handed a nationally significant 1918 theatre to developers for demolition (read it in SLUG). The story had been in the news for a while and continue to gain traction, written up by multiple reporters at The Salt Lake Tribune and elsewhere. Months later, I learned that the Mayor’s office had contacted SLUG asking about the author behind the piece—an unexpected development that sharpened the sense of risk many preservation advocates already felt. When the city ultimately went through with the demolition during the pandemic, I remember standing on Main Street and looking at the cleared site where the theatre had stood.
What followed has only underscored the loss. The redevelopment tower promised in exchange for tearing down the theatre has yet to materialize. According to recent reporting, the property has been cleared and is being used as a temporary surface parking lot while the high-rise project remains stalled. The developer has requested paving and interim-use approvals, and the site continues to sit empty—an absence rather than a new beginning.
In the words of the Salt Lake Tribune, the theatre was “torn down in 2022 … to make way for a parking lot,” a bitter outcome when the city gave up a historic landmark and a (rumored to be) priceless Tiffany skylight, taken from the site before the demolition. The RDA has been rebranded the CRA, with no mention of the name change on the city’s websites.
One Success Story
Against that backdrop, the work happening at the B’nai Israel Temple feels like a rare counterexample. Instead of another teardown or another “too expensive to save” narrative, the building is being restored in a way that reconnects it to the community that built it. SLAM’s founder, art historian Micah Christensen—whose family operates Anthony’s Fine Art & Antiques just a few blocks away—has rooted the museum’s vision in the building’s layered cultural history, and in the relationships his family has maintained within the area for generations (more in the 15 Bytes article). The museum’s presence inside the old sanctuary weaves together family history, art, and the cultural life of the neighborhood. It’s a reminder that preservation can be generative—not just resistance to loss, but a way of making room for future stories inside an inherited space.
Preservation always sits somewhere between memory and power. Cambridge taught me that some places endure because whole communities quietly steward them. Salt Lake taught me that some buildings require a public fight, and that those fights sometimes come with unexpected personal costs. The B’nai Israel Temple—and the work SLAM is beginning inside it—offers a different model: a moment where the city, the institution, and the community align long enough to let history remain visible. After watching the Pantages reduced to a cleared lot awaiting a project that still hasn’t begun, that alignment feels worth noting.
Sometimes when I get overwhelmed, I stare at images. I think a lot of art historians secretly like to do this. A few minutes stolen from the day to look at something aesthetically balanced, proportioned, harmonized—something that happens, almost mysteriously, to be tuned to one’s own internal frequency, whenever or wherever the image was made.
I keep a lot of photographs of the rural villages and small churches I loved in England—especially around Walsingham, where I did my field work. One church in that religious-architecture-dense village is the Church of the Holy Transfiguration. It was one of the first places where I encountered the idea of an ikon, despite having studied art history as an undergrad. Their website describes it simply: “Ikons are, for Orthodox Christians, windows into the eternal dimension of reality. They are not realistic depictions or even works of art, but are a means by which Christ and his saints are made present to us.”
Walsingham sits in Norfolk, that green, shaggy corner of England facing the North Sea, a region shaped by the old Norþfolc—“the north people.” The county looks outward toward Normandy, and after the Norman conquest of 1066, it became one of the first areas drawn tightly under their rule. You can still see the imprint of that history: earthworks softened by centuries of rain, hamlets that feel older than they appear, and Walsingham itself, a place formed by centuries of crossing and return.
The Chapel of St Seraphim isn’t especially beautiful as “a building,” but there’s something about it—something I always felt drawn to. Then again, I’m biased; I’ve always had a soft spot for red brick. It almost looks like the house I grew up in.
Another image I return to, struck by its emotional impact, is of Mount Kailash. In the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, this mountain is seen as a celestial link between earth and heaven—a gateway to the divine. Its names carry some of that meaning, too. The Sanskrit name Kailāśa is likely derived from kelāsa, meaning “crystal.” And the Tibetan name Gangs Rinpoche (གངས་རིན་པོ་ཆེ) combines “gang/gāng” (snow peak) and “rinpoche/rin po che” (precious one), often rendered as “precious jewel of snows.”
There are also references that place Kailash inside Buddhist cosmology. One source notes: “It’s central to its cosmology, and a major pilgrimage site for some Buddhist traditions.” Taken together, the names and descriptions sketch the outline of a mountain regarded by many as sacred, even before you ever see its shape.
Praise to Buddha Shakyamuni
O Blessed One, Shakyamuni Buddha
Precious treasury of compassion,
Bestower of supreme inner peace,
You, who love all beings without exception,
Are the source of happiness and goodness;
And you guide us to the liberating path.
Your body is a wish fulfilling jewel,
Your speech is supreme, purifying nectar,
And your mind is refuge for all living beings.
With folded hands I turn to you,
Supreme unchanging friend,
I request from the depths of my heart:
Please give me the light of your wisdom
To dispel the darkness of my mind
And to heal my mental continuum.
Please nourish me with your goodness,
That I in turn may nourish all beings
With an unceasing banquet of delight.
Through your compassionate intention,
Your blessings and virtuous deeds,
And my strong wish to rely upon you,
May all suffering quickly cease
And all happiness and joy be fulfilled;
And may holy Dharma flourish for evermore.
— Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche
My Image as Seen by Others
When I was in Europe, I experienced a variety of different types of prejudice. Class is very important there, so my class was known and felt immediately. But I benefited from the “celebrity” implications of my American accent as well. People were interested and invited me places – I tried not to step on toes, eat too much, talk too much, or annoy anyone. I failed on every count almost every month, but Cambridge is a remarkably forgiving and welcoming place, and I was lucky enough to call an international college, Hughes Hall, home.
Even still, the person who hurts us most is always closest. Some of the worst American stereotypes applied to me were from my long-time French boyfriend. The one that hurt most… he told me: You’re a walking hippie stereotype. No one had ever called me that. I had almost never encountered other “hippies” in my life, although I’d written my high school thesis on the Beatles and Tom Wolfe. I think it was obvious it was only a matter of time until I fell for the Grateful Dead, but not before I’d spend years curled up with Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin. I’d been to San Francisco only once before I flew to England (the same summer in 2013, in fact), but other than that, I’d been raised around traditional, respectable, be-khakied people in the far-off land of OOTTAWW, as I had to mouth slowly for the French. Although my mom was born in Marin Hospital, my grandparents were more beatniks-turned-respectable.
I fell in love with Buddhism in England, actually. Making my weekly stop-off in the Tibetan store across from Kings, I gasped when I walked in at the same time as the owner. “Did you really meet the Dalai Lama?” Excuse a girl for having a naive sense of wonder (about everything, but especially about Buddhism).
I don’t think I ever totally felt comfortable with my boyfriend after that, seeing myself in that way so denigrated in my sincere beliefs. I’d worked on an exhibit at the MAA called Buddha’s Word, which was the first exhibition of Tibetan material in Cambridge, and the first time in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s history that its Buddhist collections had ever been presented together. It was developed in partnership with the Mongolia and Inner Asia Research Unit, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Frederick Williamson Memorial Fund, and drew on collections from across Cambridge — the MAA, the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, the Fitzwilliam, the University Library, even Emmanuel and Pembroke Colleges.
It mattered to me. The project mattered, the materials mattered, the scholarship mattered. Buddhism wasn’t a phase or an affectation — it was part of my intellectual and spiritual life, tied to real work I was doing inside these institutions. So when he reduced it all to a stereotype, it wasn’t just a careless comment; it was a small betrayal of how deeply I cared about something he never bothered to understand.
Pareidolia: The Velvet Knife of the Unbothered
Speaking of image gazing: Pareidolia is the tendency of the human mind to perceive recognizable forms — especially faces — in random or ambiguous stimuli. In American intellectual history, the concept has appeared in several distinct contexts. During the 19th century, writers associated with Romanticism often referenced pareidolic perception when describing heightened imagination, seeing symbolic meaning in nature, or interpreting landscapes as expressive. In medical and psychological discourse of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pareidolia was sometimes discussed in relation to certain mental-health conditions, particularly those involving misinterpretation of sensory information.
In popular culture, it has repeatedly surfaced in narratives about “seeing signs,” spiritual imagery, and the interpretation of natural forms. Across literature, psychology, and journalism, pareidolia has functioned as a descriptive term for how people project patterns, meanings, or emotional significance onto otherwise neutral visual cues.
If Europe taught me anything, it’s that mis-seeing can also be an art form, and a particularly glaring one in some university contexts. Not always intentional, not always cruel, but pervasive — especially among the confident, the class-assured, the ones who glide through rooms believing their interpretations of others are simply facts.
Pareidolia isn’t just seeing faces in clouds; it’s assuming before they’ve spoken a full sentence. My grandmother used to say, “to assume is to make an ASS of U and ME.” To criticize spirituality has become the reflex of the elite and unbothered: a velvet knife disguised as scientific clarity. However, there is, as we saw in the last post about Surrealism, the unconscious, chance, and AI, a level of hallucination required to see something special in an image, an ordinary building, or in general. Maybe we art historians really are all crazy.
