Urban Design : Spare St. Vibiana’s the Wrecking Ball

Ever since Cardinal Roger Mahony announced, in January, that he planned to demolish the historic St. Vibiana’s Cathedral and replace it with a new mega-structure in Spanish California design, Angelenos and others who deeply care about the enduring legacy of this city have been in a state of shock. How could the Roman Catholic Church, mother of the arts, patroness of architecture throughout the ages, be considering such a violent--and so unnecessary--deed? How could the cardinal, representing the church that has nurtured Los Angeles since 1781, seem so preemptive, so dictatorial, so harsh?

The proposal to demolish St. Vibiana’s, a proposal advanced without consideration of alternatives, represents the opening of a division between the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the people of this city that is not needed at this moment in history, especially given the succession of traumas Los Angeles has endured this past half decade.

In its design and material fabric, St. Vibiana’s subsumes and preserves the identity of the Catholic experience in Los Angeles, so central to the spiritual and cultural identity of the city. Only the Plaza Church at El Pueblo de Los Angeles has deeper taproots in the Los Angeles psyche. Dedicated in 1876, St. Vibiana’s melds in one alembic the Spanish origins of colonial California, Los Angeles’ connection with Roman, hence European, civilization and the American identity that came to the City of Angels with statehood.

Ezra F. Kysor, the first prominent architect to practice in this city, modeled St. Vibiana’s on the Church of Puerto de San Miguel in Barcelona, Spain, hometown of the then bishop of Los Angeles, Thaddeus Amat, a Vicentian missionary. In the material fabric of architecture was created a living link with Spain, which had brought European civilization to California, in the same way that the Pilgrims had brought it to Massachusetts on the Atlantic coast.

The very year St. Vibiana’s was dedicated, 1876, was the centennial of the American republic. Among his other ambitions, Bishop Amat wanted to make a gift of a great cathedral to all the people of the City of Angels, Catholics and non-Catholics alike--a gift that would symbolize the arrival of Los Angeles on a new plateau of American identity. Through the majesty of architecture, St. Vibiana’s announced that Los Angeles had, indeed, arrived at its urban identity. It would be a city drawing its traditions and strength from the legacies of Spain and Mexico. Bishop Amat saw his cathedral as an enduring repository of spiritual, moral and imaginative consciousness in the Far West.

Today, 119 years after it was dedicated, St. Vibiana’s is no mere cathedral, no mere landmark. It is one of the half-dozen structures through which Los Angeles knows itself. In a city that has squandered so much of its architectural history, the cathedral offers Los Angeles one of its few fixed points of reference, one of its few anchor points in time. “All cathedrals are not equal,” Father Clyde Crews, professor of theology at Bellarmine College, Kentucky, recently observed in a Catholic newspaper. “Some cross the line, as it were, becoming not only a religious landmark but a kind of civic tapestry in which the strands of urban and even national history come together in a weave of great complexity, reminding an entire people both who they have been and who they might be.”

To amputate such a structure, part of the living tissue of Los Angeles, without dialogue, without entertaining alternatives, merely as a matter of episcopal ukase, is too violent an act to contemplate. Now that the cardinal has shown that he has the power, the authority and the machismo to bulldoze Vibiana’s, could he not enter into dialogue with those who wish to save the structure that is so central to the sacred and secular identity of Los Angeles? A willingness to listen would indicate no weakness on the cardinal’s part.

Should the cardinal and the generous lay donors behind the proposed new cathedral and Cathedral Square project agree to listen, they might hear, for example, how the city of Siena, in Italy, integrated an old and new cathedral structure, to the enhancement of both.

A project of pure restoration is not an alternative, although the archdioceses of Philadelphia and Louisville, and the diocese of San Jose, have successfully completed such projects. The cardinal, justifiably--his archdiocese is the largest in the Roman Catholic world--has a much larger project in mind: a new cathedral, an 800-seat auditorium, a conference center, a chancery office and rectory, and two floors of underground parking.

What can be debated, however, is the necessity of destroying St. Vibiana’s in the process. Given the irreplaceability of the cathedral as a building block of L.A. identity, why could not St. Vibiana’s be integrated into the larger complex envisioned by the cardinal? It could form the transept for a new structure, for example, which would constitute the nave. The resulting cruciform would echo the classic configuration of the medieval cathedral. What a challenge for an architect to come into dialogue with this grand building by treating it as a pre-existing transept. Such a scheme would incorporate every aspect of the cardinal’s building program. At the same time, it would create a powerful architectural integration of the past, present and future.

It offers a scandal to the truth, furthermore, to cite seismic considerations. St. Vibiana’s is in no danger of imminent collapse, despite the protective shroud that currently swathes the bell tower as a public-relations gesture. The cathedral was safe enough, apparently, for President Bill Clinton and his entourage. It was safe enough in October, apparently, for the marriage of John Wellborne and Martha Lambert, when seismic weakness, if it really existed on the scale that is claimed, would have put at risk two-thirds of the oligarchy of Los Angeles. Surely, the technology exists to bring St. Vibiana’s up to code, especially if reinforcement consists of an integration into a new structure.

Near the high altar of the cathedral is a marble catafalque containing the remains of St. Vibiana, a young woman who died for her faith in the 3rd Century. Unearthed from the catacombs of Rome in 1853, her remains were sent to Los Angeles in the mid-1870s, to be preserved for all times in what was then a glorious new edifice. How appropriate for the cathedral of Los Angeles to contain the remains of a young woman who had met violence, some 17 centuries ago, because she would not yield to the insistence and domination of worldly power.

Her agony (Was she broken on the rack? Was she thrown to the lions? Was she strangled on a winter’s night? ) has proven poignantly prophetic to a city where vulnerability and power ceaselessly clash. Shall they clash once again in the destruction of St. Vibiana’s? Shall those who find in this building a precious link with the incommunicable past be swept aside in their efforts to suggest alternatives? Or will there be dialogue and discussion?