Will getting on the National Register of Historic Places save Utah’s Abravanel Hall?

Musicians Lori Wike, Karen Wyatt and David Porter have been performing with the Utah Symphony a combined total of 52 years. But that doesn’t mean the excitement of performing at Abravanel Hall has grown old, or that the magic has worn off.

You can see it in the way they animatedly talk about Abravanel Hall, the home of the Utah Symphony, and how they (along with the symphony’s more than 80 other musicians) consider themselves stewards of the place.

They talk about the way Temple Square, the symphony’s home before Abravanel opened in 1979, is visible from the lobby. And they talk about how the floating tier design extends into the performance hall.

“A lot of us have played in concert halls all over the world, and there really is no building like this,” said Wyatt, who has played violin with the symphony for 11 years. “It’s a testament to mid-century modern architecture. It reflects our past while looking forward to our future. … I walk in here every time and I always smile. I’m just so proud to call this my home.”

In the performance hall, the musicians point out things that most visitors wouldn’t notice — acoustic notes picked up by well-trained ears with decades of experience. For example, how the acoustics feel different where there are people in those carefully crafted seats versus when they are empty.

Onstage, Porter, a violinist for 22 years with the symphony, noted that if a violinist is playing a solo at the front of the stage, they need to take a step back to be heard better throughout the hall. (He also said the sound is best in the back section of the hall’s third tier.)

“The orchestra and the hall, we’re a combined entity,” Porter said. “We couldn’t be the orchestra we are without a hall like this.”

Wyatt agreed, “We’ve honed our sound because of this hall,” she said.

Steve Brosvik, the president and CEO of Utah Symphony | Utah Opera is adamant that there is no bad seat in the house.

“One of the things about the hall, as with all the really good concert halls, is that if you want to do something amplified, because the hall is built so well, to equally reflect the sound, you actually have to kind of break the acoustic a little bit,” Brosvik said.

Brosvik gestured to a mechanism they built in the opera studio, a black banner that is present on every level of the hall that absorbs some of the sound so it doesn’t reflect back to the stage. It’s helpful, he said, when there are speakers on for such events as the symphony’s Films in Concert series.

Everything about the performance hall is meant to accent and uplift the music performed on the stage, said Wike, who has played bassoon with the symphony for 19 years.

“The shape, design, the one-and-a-half inch plaster that surrounds this entire performance hall space, the forest green seats [that] were lab tested for over a year for acoustical properties, the fact that it’s wood, versus concrete … the overhang of the tiers, " she said, listing off some examples.

“As professional musicians, we just feel so fortunate to be able to play in such a remarkable acoustic space,” Wike said.

Wike credited Cyril Harris, the acoustic engineer behind Abravanel Hall and many other concert halls, for the attention to detail and ensuring that the acoustics were “planned meticulously.”

Wike is familiar with many of these details from Harris’ engineering, in part because she is one of seven members of an ad hoc committee representing the musicians of the symphony as advocates for Abravanel Hall — whose fate is in the air with the downtown revitalization plan proposed by Smith Entertainment Group. Wike’s focus is on research and preservation.

Wike — worked with Adrienne White, the founder and CEO of House Genealogy (where White researches historic homes and the people who lived in them) who has put together a draft application to have Abravanel Hall be put on the National Register of Historic Places.

“One of the first things we looked at was the example of how Carnegie Hall was saved from being destroyed back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s,” Wike said.

The beloved New York music venue, Wike said, “was saved through historic preservation legislation, as well as the tireless advocacy of violinist Isaac Stern and the support of so many civic leaders.” Stern, who performed 250 times at Carnegie Hall between 1943 to 2001, launched the campaign to prevent the hall’s demolition.

The application to put Abravanel Hall on the register is currently a 72-page draft. There will be a public hearing for the Salt Lake City Historic Landmark Commission on Thursday, when the commission will review and provide input on the nomination of Abravanel Hall. It will be reviewed at a National Register Review committee hearing on Sept. 19.

Diving into Abravanel’s history

White said Wike reached out to her to help write the proposal because of White’s work as a historian and researcher. (She also sits on the city’s Historic Landmark Commission, but is working on this application as a private citizen.)

The 72-page application took 38 days to write and submit, White said.

“What I do is I scour the depths of the internet for any and all information about whatever my subject matter is,” White said.

For this application, White spoke with John Price, the construction manager on the Symphony Hall project back in the 1970s, and looked over original drawings from that period. She also looked at historic newspapers using a variety of search terms. Then, White uses those facts to craft “a narrative of significance.”

In the draft application, White touches on the design aspects of Abravanel Hall.

“Dr. Harris designed Symphony Hall with a meticulous attention to each and every detail that could impact the space’s acoustics, including the floor material, the design of the seats, the thickness of the ceiling, and the angles of the walls,” White wrote in the application.

White also talked about the complexity of designing such a venue. “Although acousticians know how sound behaves and can measure it exactly, the practical application of the engineering of a concert hall is more complex than being reduced to equations and exact science,” she wrote.

“When it comes to certain refinements in engineering, acoustics becomes art,” Harris is quoted as saying in a 1981 New York Times Magazine article that is cited in the draft.

“One of the most valuable resources was an oral history interview that was done with Dr. Harris through the American Institute of Physics,” White said. “So I was able to use Dr. Harris’s own words, which is so incredibly valuable, given that he is no longer alive.”

The draft also notes that the hall received several awards after its construction, such as the Award of Merit in 1979 from the Utah Heritage Foundation (now known as Preservation Utah).

Allen Roberts, a Salt Lake City preservationist and co-founder of the architectural firm CRSA architectural firm, “was brought in to advise on the building as a historic site, and to evaluate the study that was done by another local architectural firm.”

Roberts has been contributing to preservation efforts in Salt Lake City and throughout Utah for years. White noted that Roberts has led efforts to designate several historic districts, and to put more than 100 buildings on the National Register.

White said Roberts also shared “alternative ways to cut costs to preserve the building while bringing it up to code.”

That study Roberts looked at, which Salt Lake County commissioned from the architectural firm Sparano+Mooney, made headlines when it became public in May — because it said retrofitting and upgrading Abravanel Hall would cost at least $200 million.

Roberts said the study is “overblown.”

“It resulted from interviewing several different groups, including the musicians and all of the groups told the architects what they would like to see happen in the project,” Roberts said. “What I’m seeing is that study that was done for the county is not the only set of options. There are infinite options.”

John Sparano, principal and co-founder of Sparano+Mooney, said the study — outlined in a 362-page report presented to the Salt Lake County Council in May — addresses the “list of issues within the venue that need to be addressed,” adding that “there are no easy fixes here.”

“Abravanel Hall is a complex, historic building with many limitations that require complex solutions,” Sparano wrote in an email statement to The Tribune. The firm’s team worked for a year, he said, “literally and figuratively crawling all over the building to understand its positive aspects as well as deficiencies.”

The firm and its consultants, Sparano wrote, “have current experience with concert hall renovation design.”

For their study, Sparano said they addressed the county’s direction “to identify Abravanel Hall’s current shortcomings.” The firm met with many stakeholders, including the county staff who operate the venue, symphony musicians, arts organizations, groups that rent the venue and the hall’s downtown neighbors, according to Sparano.

Sparano wrote that the $200 million estimate was the work of a professional cost estimator who specializes in “calculating probable costs of construction for this exact building type” — and that the estimates “are as accurate as construction costs can be at such an early planning stage.”

Sparano said some of the work could be done in phases, if the county chooses.

A change in the narrative

White said she hopes that if the application for the register is approved, the designation might “change the narrative for the average citizen.”

The register, White said, is “this added badge of value and significance.” She added that the application is “just one pillar of the preservation effort” of Wike’s ad hoc committee.”

Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson was noncommittal about the register application.

“Salt Lake County owns Abravanel Hall; however, the state does not require our feedback to consider a National Register of Historic Places application,” Wilson wrote in a statement. “We continue to investigate options that balance preservation, modernization, and activation of the space.”

Getting listed on the register is no guarantee that a property will be preserved, said Cory Jensen, the National Register coordinator for the Utah State Historic Preservation Office.

“Those types of regulations come at the local government level, where preservation ordinances may be passed to protect historic properties,” Jensen wrote in an email interview. (The preservation office is not involved with the application for Abravanel Hall, a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement said.)

“There are no restrictions for properties listed in the Register, the owner is free to maintain them as they please,” Jensen wrote. “As there are no regulations on how the property is maintained, there are incentives to keep and preserve the listed property, including potential for historic tax credits and grant opportunities.”

The register, Jensen wrote, is a listing of “properties found to be significant in American history or architecture.” Its purpose “is to honor those properties, to educate the public on our history and to encourage preservation of those properties.”

Wike said Abravanel is a “cultural beacon” and a “landmark in Utah,” and merits a spot on the register.

“Abravanel Hall is irreplaceable,” Wike said. “Acoustic engineers, as Adrienne [White] wrote in her narrative, they can test elements in a laboratory, but they can’t conduct life-size trial runs for their acoustical designs. Acoustics is a mixture of science, art and luck. And we got incredibly lucky with Abravanel Hall.”

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