As part of its landscaping for both the Conference Center and the new Church History Library, the church has brought part of historic City Creek back to the surface (it has long been channeled through underground pipes). Shallow waters flow along rock-lined channels planted with native grasses and flowers, lending pleasant natural sounds and movement to North Temple street.
If you look closely at the granite stones piled along the stream, you’ll see that a few of them bear traces of human activity: chisel marks, and small holes drilled in straight lines. These are not signs of modern vandalism. These scars, rather, date to the 1860s, ’70s, or ’80s, and are indications that a boulder came from the granite quarries in Little Cottonwood Canyon, where pioneer laborers cut stone to build the Salt Lake Temple, and later for the Church Administration Building and the Utah Capitol. Stone for the Conference Center was cut from the same quarries in the 1990s; when workmen noted these traces of their pioneer forebears, those boulders were set aside for landscaping purposes.