This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Editor's note • In this regular series, The Tribune explores the once-favorite places of Utahns, from restaurants to recreation to retail.
Delta • There's nothing quite like Van's Hall, the colorful second-story invention of the late Billy Van De Vanter that still stands on Delta's Main Street above mostly empty storefronts.
A small booth, with a roll of 15-cent tickets visible inside, and two small signs hint at what's upstairs. When Janeal Young, the office manager for Delta's Great Basin Museum, takes a visitor to the top of a wide stairway, a surreal feast for the eyes magically appears.
A big mirrored ball with a carving of the Salt Lake Temple of the LDS Church on top. Tracks where an electric train once ran. An airplane pulling a banner reading, "We dance next Saturday." More sculptures and thousands of mirrors.
The eclectic room was once voted the nation's best dance hall and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
"We get so many veterans from all over the state coming here," said Delta resident Laurie Griffiths, a member of a restoration committee formed to save the unique hall.
"So many met their wives there and danced there. Tears run down their faces. We've made so many friends by taking them up there. They tell stories. ... Everybody who sees that building is in awe of all of the art and architecture in there."
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A lion, puppets and baseball, oh my • Though disco balls came into prominence in the 1970s, they became popular in dance halls in the 1920s. Van De Vanter not only constructed his unique ball, but decorated his colorful dance hall with some 20,000 mirror pieces. They can be seen almost everywhere.
The hall features wind chimes, a coat and hat-check counter, an elevated stage where Van De Vanter sometimes staged puppet shows with his own hand-carved wooden creations, and a small orchestra stage.
Local legend has it that the builder created a dance floor out of melted records, though some dispute that, and the floor is now made of a different material since no one could quite replicate Van De Vanter's rumored formula.
Though the Great Basin Museum has a number of photos of the hall, records are sketchy about the building's history. Griffiths said Van De Vanter started the project in 1927 and worked on improving it until his death in 1942.
Van De Vanter had moved to Delta in 1907, where he began making a living as a plasterer.
Young said he shaped Delta in many ways. He invented cooling systems and fans that predated air conditioning, as well as mining equipment. He constructed a race car with two Model T engines in it. Some of his sculptures that are now inside Van's Hall decorated the front of his Mutt and Jeff garage on Delta's Main Street.
Van De Vanter built an open-air theater where he showed movies and live shows. A carousel he constructed, including carved animals, was purchased for a Hollywood movie.
Young has preserved fading newspaper articles about Van De Vanter's menagerie, which included a monkey, peacocks, porcupines and other small animals.
The man loved baseball, sponsoring and managing a local Delta team and building a mechanical baseball team, complete with fans in bleachers in the background. The heads of two of those wooden baseball puppets can be seen inside the hall today.
A huge lion sculpture and another of a dog now stand on either side of the puppet stage. Though Van De Vanter was not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he loved the architecture of the Salt Lake Temple and sculpted another one seen on the north side of the hall.
Another local legend has it that a bootlegger often hid out under the back stairs on the south side selling his wares. Some say tunnels found under the building led to a creamery on the opposite side of the hall, where booze was hidden under stacks of butter and sent to the nearby mining town of Eureka.
"In comparison with church facilities, Van's Hall was obviously the more boisterous and fun-loving venue for dances," according to a description filed with the National Register. "And no other facility could compete with the exotic atmosphere of Van's Hall, with its glittering mirrors and lights."
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'People would love to dance up there' • The dancing continued through the 1950s after Van De Vanter's death. But the hall, which was known for its deer- and pheasant-hunt balls, closed in the 1960s.
Though Delta High School used it for a homecoming dance in 2008, it is seldom open unless someone asks for a tour.
In 2002, it looked as though Van's Hall might be destroyed. The roof was leaking and the building was in danger of collapsing.
Since then, the restoration committee has done "quite a bit of work on it," said Griffiths. "We constructed a new roof and put in a new floor and bathrooms. ... There were quite a few windows that were out. We replaced the windows, swept the floor and kept it clean. There are no leaks."
Her grandson, Cole Austin Smith, is doing an Eagle Scout project working to shine the thousands of mirrors inside the building.
Griffiths, who operates a wedding center called The Gathering Place near Van's Hall, said she is working to organize local residents to raise $6,000 to do a feasibility study on what it would take to bring the building up to code. That would be required before preservationists could apply for grants to restore Van's Hall as a dance hall and community center.
"The hall is in pretty good shape," she said, adding, "if we could get it up to code, people would love to dance up there."
Though Van's Hall is silent these days, it may still have a future, as residents such as Griffiths work to preserve it as much as they can in hopes that dance bands may someday play again in one of Utah's most colorful buildings.
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