Lindquist Mortuaries celebrates Ogden expansion with ribbon-cutting ceremony
OGDEN — Now in its 157th year of operation, the company that came to be known as Lindquist Mortuaries and Cemeteries celebrated its biggest expansion to date at its Ogden campus on Washington Boulevard with a ribbon-cutting Wednesday afternoon.
Work was completed on the mortuary’s new arrangement area and community room late last year, and a large crowd gathered to celebrate the occasion. Members of the Ogden-Weber Chamber of Commerce — including the Spikers, the chamber’s official ambassadors — were on hand for the event, which also was attended by dignitaries like state Sen. Ann Millner, Weber County Commissioner Jim Harvey, Weber County Sheriff Ryan Arbon and others.
“As the years have gone on, we have seen changes to the funeral service, which is the reason why we ended up absorbing the Lindquist office building into the operations of the mortuary. We saw a need to have a community room to host luncheons, to give families an alternative to your traditional-type funeral service so that they might feel a little more comfortable in the less formal space,” Assistant General Manager Bobby Lindquist said of the expansion.
“It has been quite well received,” he added.
Several memorial services, after-funeral luncheons and even some business parties have been hosted in the new community room, which Lindquist stressed as being “part of the mortuary campus, but it’s not the mortuary.” In recent weeks, the company also hosted a free photo-scanning event in the space for the first time, a continuation of a service that has been performed at all of Lindquist’s locations.
Lindquist further noted that the arrangement area includes a “modern display section of caskets, vaults and headstones,” in addition to five arrangement rooms where staff can sit with grieving families.
Additional upgrades are coming to the Ogden campus, too, with a major parking expansion currently underway on-site.
“We’re converting most of our existing parking to from 9-foot-wide stalls to 10-foot-wide stalls,” Lindquist told the Standard-Examiner. “And this will give us over 300 parking stalls at our Ogden location.”
Lindquist also indicated that similar upgrades and expansion efforts are planned for other locations.
“In the next year or so, we will be going to our Layton location and kind of doing the same thing on our lower level,” he said. “We have about 15,000 square feet that we’re going to remodel. We’ll make a community room. We’ll make a nice arrangement area, just like we did here in the office building in Ogden. And, at that time, we’ll be adding several additional parking stalls in Layton as well.”
Following the ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday, tours were given of the arrangement area and community room during a “Business After Hours” event hosted by the chamber.