SAN CLEMENTE : Association Sells 60-Acre Pageant Site

It was on July 22, 1769, when Father Junipero Serra is said to have performed the first baptism in California while accompanying a Spanish expedition through the hills behind what is now San Clemente.

Now, 223 years later, the nonprofit La Cristianita Pageant Assn., named after the Juaneno baby girl who was baptized by the padre, stands at a crossroads in its effort to preserve that historical moment in a grand passion play entitled “The Cross and the Arrow.”

“We’re just now starting all over again,” said Bertha Henry Taylor, who revived the pageant in 1973 when she became the first woman president of the San Clemente Chamber of Commerce. “You have to crawl before you walk.”

On Tuesday, the association--beset in recent years by property tax problems, complaints from neighbors and vandalism of stage props--completed arrangements to sell its 60-acre pageant site in a rustic canyon off Camino de los Mares in the Forster Ranch subdivision to Darrel Spence of Estrella Properties Ltd, officials said. The sale price was not disclosed.

It was Spence, the original developer of the 1,919-acre Forster Ranch community, who donated the land to the pageant in late 1984.

“We were on shaky ground and opted to go with someone who has always treated us fondly,” Dorothy Fuller, a member of the association, said. “Our first concern was if the pageant could go on.”

Without the sale, the association was on the verge of losing the land to the county because of $160,000 in unpaid taxes, said Jim Miranda, a San Clemente real estate agent who is president of the association.

An 18-month-old lease agreement with Clemente Hills, a group seeking to buy the site for about $1 million to build a golf course, had also fallen through, Miranda said.

“The association board had to make a strict financial decision on which way we could fly,” Miranda said.

An official with Clemente Hills, however, has said he does not believe that the contract with the association was breached. The group is considering legal action to stop the sale to Spence.

Meanwhile, the association, which hasn’t staged the pageant since 1988, will regroup and use the money made from the sale to organize future full-scale productions at another location. The group is already planning on staging several smaller historical vignettes during Rancho Days in San Juan Capistrano.

“The history is what’s important,” Taylor said. “It was a wonderful thing for this community.”

The pageant, generally staged at the end of July, ran continuously between 1976 and 1988, at which point the association was unable to raise the money to repair damage done to the pageant’s sets by vandals.

During its peak, the pageant, which included a cast of 100 volunteers and live horses and other animals, would draw about 500 people a night, Taylor said.

Remnants of the production can still be seen at the pageant site. A large cross still stands in the hills above the stage area. A pile of weathered palm leaves, which once formed Indian huts, rest next to a small dilapidated stable. An arch, used to mark the entrance to the amphitheater, bears the scars of past vandalism.

Now with the sale, no one is quite sure what Estrella Properties Ltd. will do with the land, which is zoned only for open space. Spence was unavailable for comment Wednesday.