For 73 years, Wayfarers Chapel has stood as a unique and serene sight on a plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.’s mid-20th century reimagining of church.
Surrounded by redwood trees, this photogenic, crystal-clear sanctuary was beloved long before it became Instagram famous. Jayne Mansfield There he got married, Brian Wilson Last Christmas Eve, the chapel National Historic LandmarkIt took three services to accommodate everyone who had gathered to spend the holiday with the chapel regulars. Little did anyone know that it would be the last service.
This month, Wayfarers Chapel will be demolished, an emergency attempt to preserve the building’s irreplaceable redwood, steel, and stone components in the aftermath of a devastating landslide. Church leaders hope that by demolishing it now, before it twists and breaks beyond repair, they can one day give the church a second life on more stable ground. They don’t yet have the funds to rebuild, but they’re doing what they can in this critical time, which means spending about $500,000 on triage.
Since it opened on Mother’s Day in 1951, the Palos Verdes Peninsula on which the chapel sits has long been a geological anomaly. For decades, slow landslides have buckled roads and cracked foundations. But in early February, a historic atmospheric river storm slammed into Los Angeles County, accelerating the peninsula’s landslides. Water from the torrential rains seeped into layers of brittle shale beneath the chapel, eventually pooling on top of ancient volcanic ash deposits called bentonite. Bentonite acts like a malleable clay when wet. The chapel’s bedrock began to slide toward the sea on top of the liquefied bentonite at an astonishing rate of about seven inches per week. No structure can withstand that kind of torque for long, much less one made primarily of glass. Broken window panes were one of the warning signs, along with dispiriting cracks in the chapel’s cornerstones.
The meticulous demolition will be completed piecemeal in the coming weeks, with the chapel likely to remain in storage for a few years until a new home can be found. “People are crying,” said Katie Horak, a member of the New York preservation team. Architectural Resources Group“We do this because we love buildings like this. This is an act of mourning a sacred space,” said John F. Kennedy, whose firm was tasked with the demolition.
The Wayfarers emergency highlights the vulnerability of beloved cultural heritage sites in times of extreme weather. Scientists have predicted that global warming will lead to more powerful storms, but people across the board are being shocked by the rapid pace of these disasters. Speeded up. “It’s unfortunate that this happened,” said Mike Phipps, a geologist with the city of Rancho Palos Verdes. “We’ve been monitoring this landslide for almost 40 years. We can chart how it moved, but this is the first time we’ve seen anything like this. It was caused by rain.”
While news reports prioritize the immediate loss of life and homes in the aftermath of a superstorm, preservationists are calling for greater attention to another kind of loss: the destruction of heritage sites that represent humanity’s most powerful memories and traditions.
“It’s really hitting home right now,” said Jim Lindberg, senior policy director for the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, which Climate-affected areas And manage Local Subsidies To protect them. “We’re realizing that there really isn’t any place that isn’t vulnerable in some way.”
A chapel inspired by, and threatened by, nature
Last Sunday morning, 30 Wayfarers regulars gathered in a rented chapel a few miles from their spiritual home. It was dark and chilly inside the traditional Episcopal church, with its thick brick walls and stained-glass windows. The congregation, accustomed to worshiping among 360-degree views of blue skies, circling hawks, sequoias, ferns and hummingbirds, had opened the back door to let in the light. The Rev. David Brown, pastor of Wayfarers Chapel for 18 years, stepped forward to welcome the “Wayfarers” congregation.
“What a week, what a year,” he began, and spent a few minutes updating everyone on the status of the demolition. He then asked for personal prayer requests, and an elderly parishioner asked him to pray for their chapel. He did so, asking God to “give us a ray of hope on this journey.”
Wayfarers Chapel began a century ago as the dream of two women, Elizabeth Schellenberg and Narcissa Cox Vanderlip, followers of a Christian sect that followed the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century scientist-turned-mystic who believed humans could connect deeply to God’s love and wisdom through nature. The concept inspired American rebels from Johnny Appleseed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Swedenborg a “great soul.” By the 1920s, the women felt the time had come for a national memorial to the theologian.
Vanderlip had the money. She donated a 4.5-acre site in Palos Verdes and began looking for an architect. The project was halted by World War II, but in the late 1940s it was acquired by Lloyd Wright, the eldest son of “organic architecture” pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright. Lloyd had trained as a landscape architect, so he was already inclined to blend natural and structural elements. Before starting to design the chapel, he took a road trip to see California’s famous sequoias. Looking up through the arching branches, he felt like he was already in a sanctuary. And so the idea came to him: a design that would be radically different from traditional church architecture, one that would feel like a tomb.
“The concept was for life.” He told Wayfair leaders: Before his death in 1978, he said, “Infinite life, infinite space, not a graveyard. I think we’ve achieved that.”
Since then, the chapel has only grown in popularity: After the coronavirus lockdown was lifted, the landmark began attracting nearly 500,000 non-religious visitors a year.
“They come into that space and say, ‘I don’t know what I believe, but I feel something,'” Brown says. “The secret sauce was this real-time effect that worked on a deeper level. It was a place to stop, to think, to touch the transcendent.”
Such powerful memories, and a local community that hasn’t given up on Wayfarers Chapel, may one day be the catalyst for reviving the church. Now, Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor John Cruickshank says the city is working with chapel leaders to find land nearby to house the chapel’s remains. One possibility is the former Nike missile site, about three miles away.
Worship Leader Stated They have “$5 million in savings from past wedding services” that they can put towards rebuilding. GoFundMe page The church, which was established in February, has raised nearly $75,000, and while it’s just a start, restoration architects estimate that an accurate reconstruction would cost roughly $20 million — a huge undertaking for a small church.
Brown said he was heartened by how Notre Dame raised funds from around the world to help it recover from a building fire in 2019. There are other examples of recovery and climate adaptation, including the historic St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Mayfield, Kentucky. Rebuilt After the 2021 storm, A lighthouse that has been treasured for a long time The rocks on Martha’s Vineyard were lifted, put on rails and moved off the edge of ocean cliffs, and recently the National Park Service received $20 million from the Inflation Reduction Act to Protecting resources Provide protection from climatic effects within the park boundaries.
What we inherit
What successful conservation efforts have in common is the tenacity of local people trying to keep what they hold dear to the climate.
Marcy RockmanA former National Park Service climate change specialist who now helps World Heritage sites and local organisations adapt to the threat of global warming, says we urgently need to have conversations about how to prioritise irreplaceable intangible assets, like indigenous knowledge and tangible artefacts that are deeply connected to specific places. She recounts the story of when she visited conservationist colleagues in Scotland who were trying to protect coastal communities from rising sea levels. Their candid approach stuck with her: “They said, ‘We can’t stop the ocean. We can’t continue as we are. But we can help preserve some of the most important things about this place for the future. What would you like to see happen?'”
It’s a concept that resonated with Liz MacLean, another architect on the ARG team working on Wayfarers, when she first visited the chapel. She received a surprise message from her college roommate informing her that her father had suddenly died. Still in shock and grieving for her friend, McLean parked her car. She gathered herself and walked to the glass sanctuary.
“Her father had been in the Navy and I was at a place called Wayfarers Chapel on the seaside, and somehow it felt like these things were connected,” she recalls. “And I continue to have those moments whenever I’m there. I think it’s a spiritual place that was made for all people.”
She’s currently working with contractors to determine what to do with the chapel’s broken cornerstone, how to cut around it, whether to bind it tightly so it doesn’t crack, and whether to preserve it for someday repair. It’s a practical matter, but she knows how important it is to get the details right at this moment in history.
“We can do our best to preserve the tangible things,” MacLean said, “and then try to recreate the conditions for the intangible moments sometime in the future.”
