In the shadow of angels
A man knocks on the door of the old cathedral and asks where the church went. He is looking for a copy of his daughter’s baptismal certificate. I draw a map in the air of how to get to the new cathedral, and he says “gracias” and walks away in that direction.
Inside the nearly 130-year-old, deconsecrated St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, the baptismal certificates and everything else Catholic have long been carted away. When I came to live here last year, there were still the dusty outlines of the Stations of the Cross running the length of the cathedral, but a film crew has since painted the walls and even those shadows are gone. The stained-glass windows have been removed, and clear daylight pours across the empty sanctuary onto the mosaic floor. Waves of earthen colors lap toward what remains of the marble altar.
The church may be gone, but in the bare cathedral, it feels like faith lingers, a city of people who brought their children, their marriage, their ancestors for baptism, blessing, burial since the 1880s.
I’ve seen stray cats dart through a broken vent under the cathedral, but birds own this place. Two sparrows cavort the length of the nave, then either crash, or have a fight, or mate, high at the golden capital of a column. The sparrows wake the pigeons, and one after another, they fly in an unhurried way under the vaulted ceiling and out the half-moon windows to the garden.
The cathedral, rectory and gardens span the block just south of City Hall. Five of us -- Lupe, Perri, Hal, Patrick and I -- live in the rectory, in rooms that once belonged to priests and the cardinal. There are five floors with dozens of unused rooms; the rectory is a labyrinth of doors and hallways. You turn a corner and find yourself in a room with nothing but racks of old keys, a deserted dining room with impeccably hand-stitched curtains now gray with age, a wine cellar with rolled-up maps in the slanted racks. Let the wrong door shut behind you and you are locked in an enclosed courtyard with a gurgling fountain, overgrown fan palms, wild orchids and the sparrows.
The cathedral is owned by developers -- Tom Gilmore, Jerri Perroni and Robert A. Jones -- who fashioned a plan to save it from demolition, renovate it and open its doors to the community as a performing arts center. Renovation begins soon but until then, my housemates and I live in this cloister, keeping the trees watered, the gas lines connected, the gates locked. A year ago, when I asked if I could move in, one of the developers asked me, “Are you sure?” He said there were no guarantees, that my unwritten lease could last 30 days or a year, when renovations began I’d have to move out, that even before that there’d be demolition dust and construction noise, and on top of it all, there were no doors in the two rooms that I’d asked to live in. But there were doors, beautiful oak doors that slid in and out of pockets in the wall. I whittled my life down to two rooms of furniture, I stacked my dishes in the kitchen pantry next to Hal’s, I carried a set of cathedral keys to the key man on Broadway and made some copies.
My housemates had all worked for the developers, as film or leasing reps and maintenance staff. We each asked to live here for our own reasons, because it’s cheap, because we can walk to work, because it’s an old cathedral with a garden of eucalyptus and bodhi trees smack in the middle of downtown. When we moved in, we were barely acquaintances, but in the rectory, we leave our doors open to one another. Our dogs pad from room to room, spending the day with whoever is home. We leave notes on the kitchen counter to say the dogs have been fed.
Outside, along the old cathedral walls and construction fencing, live our only neighbors. Homeless people park shopping carts and lay cardboard on the sidewalk and we negotiate our shared space in conversation, sandwiches, cigarettes, extra blankets and pleas to one another. One man opens a music book and drums incessantly on the sidewalk. There is not enough pedestrian traffic for an overturned hat; he is just practicing. On a scorching summer weekend, Perri points to our open windows and asks the drummer to give us a break. He looks at the building behind him, and says, “Somebody lives here?”
From the street view, cracks jag their way through plaster and the paint peels in stripes. The rectory windows are so caked with city grime it would be hard to see interior light even if we hadn’t unscrewed most of the bulbs to lower the utility bills we divide five ways. Lupe sweeps the sidewalks of 2nd, Los Angeles and Main, but as soon as his back’s turned, bits of trash blow up against the side of the cathedral, fraying the edges like an old cuff.
I tape a note to the mailbox: This is not an abandoned building.
I run into Cardinal Mahoney when I am grocery shopping. I stand next to his shopping cart and say, “Hey, hi! I live in your old house.” He is looking at a bakery display, and takes a moment to understand what I’m saying, but then he smiles warmly and says, “Really? Isn’t that something.” I congratulate him on his new place. He asks if everything is still working in the rectory. We have no heat, no air conditioning and our phone line loops between our balconies and disappears at an orange safety cone into the grassy field where the Union Rescue Mission used to stand. All these things have come to seem normal to me -- wearing hats all night during winter, carrying my notebook to work in the cool cathedral all summer, redialing through the temperamental disconnects of the shared phone line -- so all I think to say is that the elevator stopped running last week. When I get home and tell my housemates I saw the cardinal, Lupe asks, “Did you ask him how to get the lights on in the garden?” I say I forgot that, and Lupe says, “Because we could have a barbecue. Invite the neighbors.”
I moved here from Broadway, two blocks east, where for years I lived above Grand Central Market in a mixed-income apartment building. From my windows, I looked down through skylights to the stacked-up produce of the market, and watched the seasons change from persimmons to tangerines to plums.
Every day I walk back there, because that’s my church: a downtown neighborhood of beautiful old buildings turned into mixed-income housing. Pedestrians everywhere. An altar of California fruits and vegetables.
I trace the path across Main and Spring, round the corner to Broadway and walk the block south to 3rd as if my skinny feet can wear a path between the two places. Old maps of the city show a stream once flowed by St. Vibiana’s, and I think about Broadway as a river of people and I make a path for a rivulet to head this way.
Then I walk home. In front of the cathedral, the drummer is tapping his sticks onto a rolled-up blanket. The noise doesn’t carry.
He sees me slide my key into the old door. He asks me, “Aren’t you the sister from Holy Visitation in Detroit?”
“No,” I say. “I’m not her. I’m not a nun. I’m not even Catholic.” I ask him how his practicing is going and he says he is stuck on page 14 of his music book. It’s slow going.
The cathedral will be a performing arts center, the parking lot will be a new branch of the library, the fence will be gone. Behind the chain-link fence, a front loader is parked with its bucket on the ground. The long-abandoned Catholic school next door has been demolished to make space for the library. A truck driver hauling away the school’s rubble points to St. Vibiana’s cracked bell tower. I watch Max, the demolition foreman, shake his head: No, that stays. The man makes the sign of the cross over his trucking company jacket, touching his fingers to his breast, over the embroidered image of his 18-wheeler. St. Vibiana’s Cathedral is still holy.
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Marjorie Gellhorn Sa’adah is a recipient of the Durfee Foundation’s Artist Award; she is at work on a book about downtown Los Angeles.
