Joe Quinney Winter Sports Center

Utah

This museum spent the 2002 Winter Olympics as an office for officials and reporters, with nothing on display inside it.

historicalculture

The building went up first, and the exhibits came later. Ground was broken in the spring of two thousand, and when it was finished the owners handed it over to the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Through the games it worked as a base for Olympic officials, athletes and the world's media. An empty shell, in museum terms, and it cost ten million dollars, most of it privately raised. Three stories, twenty-nine thousand square feet, concrete on the outside and then wrapped in Plexiglas with figures and designs etched into it. After the games the committee gave it back. Turning it into an actual museum took another two and a half million. The ski museum opened quietly in May of two thousand two, and the grand opening followed in July. That September, two life-sized statues appeared in the Olympic plaza outside, one of the skier Alf Engen and one of Joe Quinney, whose name is on the door.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
During the games the center would be used by Olympic officials, members of the world media and athletes, then after the games, the building would be turned back over to the foundation.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Fort Douglas 14.7 mi A German warship crew stranded at Guam in 1914 ended up imprisoned in the foothills above Salt Lake City.
  • FamilySearch Library 17.9 mi A free library in downtown Salt Lake City holds more than two million rolls of microfilmed records from over a hundred countries.
  • Grass Creek, Utah 23.2 mi A Utah coal camp of fewer than two hundred people had its own Chinatown, and a railroad with three rails.
  • Empress Theatre (Magna, Utah) 28.6 mi A copper-mining town's 1916 movie house is run today by more than three hundred volunteers, and it's the only building in Magna on the National Register.
  • Lake Point, Utah 36.8 mi The famous bison herd on Antelope Island started as seventeen animals left over from a failed real estate scheme at Lake Point.
  • Wahsatch, Utah 41 mi In one spring, this abandoned railroad camp sheared seven hundred thousand pounds of wool.