Scottish Rite Temple Sphinxes

The two sphinxes at the front of El Paso's Scottish Rite Temple are younger than the building they guard by more than four decades. The Society of Architectural Historians' Archipedia says the Scottish Rite organised in El Paso in 1883 and met in rented rooms until the temple was built, dating the building to 1922. It credits the Dallas architects Hubbell and Greene with a restrained Classical Revival design that pays tribute to the Pan American Union Building in Washington, D.C. Masonic symbols on the arched entrance are small; the exceptions, it says, are two large, polychrome sphinxes at the staircase on the North Santa Fe Street side.

The El Paso Scottish Rite says the pair was cast in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, by the Federal-Seaboard Terra Cotta Company, which ceased operating in 1968, and trucked to El Paso. The process took ten months, ending with installation on their pedestals on 26 September 1966, and the official dedication followed on 20 October 1966 during the Scottish Rite Reunion. Each sphinx is about ten feet long and weighs nearly 4,000 pounds. The Rite describes them as the largest single-cast terra cotta sculptures in the world, a claim made by the organisation itself, and as the first sphinxes among the nine Scottish Rite bodies in Texas; El Paso later helped arrange a pair for the Waco Consistory.