The Mormon City
Wilde Visits John Taylor
On the afternoon of his lecture, Wilde was taken on a tour of Salt Lake City by the then Mormon president, John Taylor. The tour included Taylor's own residence, Gardo House, one of the finest homes in the valley.
Gardo House
70 E. South Temple, Salt Lake City, UT
Built: 1873—? (Joseph Ridges and William H. Folsom)
Completed/opening reception: January 2, 1882
Purpose: official residence of the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)
Dedicated: February 22, 1883
Demolished: November 26, 1921
Polygamy
Wilde referred sarcastically to the Mormon practice of polygamy. He wrote from Kansas City on April 17:
'I have lectured to the Mormons. The Opera House at Salt Lake is an enormous affair about the size of Covent Garden, and holds with ease fourteen families. They sit like this and are very, very ugly. The President, a nice old man, sat with five wives in the stage box.' [1]
Still on the subject of multiple wives, Wilde later told an interviewer that Salt Lake interested him because it was "the first city that ever gave a chance to ugly women." [2]
[1] Letters, 161. Wilde's illustration.
[2] Denver Tribune, April 13, 1882, 8.
Soup Kettle
In his Impressions of America, Oscar Wilde said that, "Salt Lake City contains only two buildings of note, the chief being the Tabernacle, which is in the shape of a soup-kettle." He had originally said this in newspaper interviewers in America: for instance in the Denver Tribune [1] where he added that the tabernacle was the most purely dreadful building he ever saw.
[1] Denver Tribune, April 13, 1882, 8.
