ARCHITECTURE : Don’t Rush to Demolish St. Vibiana’s

The seismic engineering report on the cathedral of St. Vibiana, recently issued by Nabih Youssef & Associates, brings Los Angeles to a new plateau of understanding and dialogue regarding the fate of the 119-year-old Downtown landmark. For some time now, Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, has been saying that he cannot, in conscience, spend the millions of dollars necessary to disassemble and reconstruct the cathedral to meet minimal standards of seismic safety. The Los Angeles Conservancy--and this writer--have advanced an alternative: the seismic reinforcement of St. Vibiana’s by incorporating it into the new Spanish Revival complex proposed by the archdiocese on the site where the old cathedral is located.

According to the Youssef report, St. Vibiana’s is in such precarious condition and rests atop such an intense confluence of faults that it would inevitably sustain heavy damage, and possibly collapse, should an earthquake the magnitude of Northridge’s strike nearby. In effect, the report contends that St. Vibiana cannot be preserved in its present integrity and continuity and meet seismic safety standards. Instead, the cathedral must be nearly disassembled, given entirely new foundations of steel, then further reinforced with the wholesale application of pneumatically applied shotcrete. At that point, the reconstructed shell could be reinstalled with the restored and seismically anchored windows, chandeliers, sconces, statuary and altars of the previous structure and repainted in its old colors and patterns. Estimated cost: $22 million.

Should Los Angeles, especially its Downtown, require of the archdiocese--which Los Angeles really has no legal right to do, anyway--that it invest $22 million into what would essentially be a replication project, without regard to what would be lost as a consequence?

For starters, the archdiocese does not have an endless supply of money. Backers of the cathedral project, the Dan Murphy and Dorothy Leavey foundations, are insisting on a new, not a replicated, structure. Second, money poured into a replication project, even if the archdiocese considered it an option, would of necessity be taken from social-service and education programs essential to the inner-city constituency of the church.

Then there is the question of the Downtown. Mahony retains the option of leaving St. Vibiana’s behind, a condemned wreck, and building his new cathedral elsewhere. He would be fully within his legal rights to do so. But, to his credit, he has never threatened to leave. His commitment to Downtown has been steadfast. His cathedral is there. He has chosen to live there himself, although he might have long since rusticated himself in some Westside parish.

The Los Angeles Conservancy, for its part, believes that what Youssef & Associates did for the Coliseum following the Northridge quake--saving it from demolition, then repairing and strengthening it--the engineering firm can do for St. Vibiana’s. Indeed, it is the Coliseum model that gives the conservancy hope that the old cathedral can be preserved. While the figure of $22 million can be extracted from the Youssef report, the conservancy admits, a less intrusive technique, also building upon the report’s recommendations, could bring the cost of seismic retrofitting down to as low as $3 million--especially if the retrofitted St. Vibiana’s is incorporated into the structure of the new cathedral complex.

The conservancy’s lower cost estimate, in fact, assumes that the existing St. Vibiana’s would be incorporated into the new complex. That way, a less intrusive restoration becomes feasible. To the conservancy, this incorporation model represents a win-win situation for both the preservationist community and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The 1876 landmark structure would be saved, and, at long last, the archdiocese would get a cathedral complex worthy of the largest archdiocese in the world.

In January, the conservancy and the Yellin Co., representing the archdiocese, will begin a three-day workshop to explore all alternatives. Invited by both sides, recognized experts--architects, engineers, site planners, cost estimators, preservation consultants, historians, liturgical consultants and clergy--will be involved in the dialogue. In addition to discussions of the alternatives--from demolition to rehabilitation and incorporation--the workshop will explore the possibility of acquiring the entire block surrounding the St. Vibiana site so as to leave room for both the preserved cathedral, the expanded cathedral and the other buildings of the complex.

The very possibility of this workshop underscores the new spirit of dialogue and cooperation since the arrival of veteran developer Ira Yellin as the lead representative of the archdiocese. Yellin comes to his task with impeccable credentials of commitment to the renewal of Downtown. And ever in the cardinal’s mind is the dream of a new St. Vibiana’s that will take his archdiocese into the next century and more: A cathedral large enough to allow the faithful to assemble with their cardinal-archbishop and their clergy for worship. It is a grand and noble ambition.

But the conservancy is traumatized by the possibility that Los Angeles will lose its oldest and grandest surviving structure from the founding era of the city. Preserving St. Vibiana’s is a worthy and noble goal, too.

As the philosopher Hegel noted, most moral decisions do not consist of a clash between good and evil--but a clash between competing goods, a clash between good and good. From this perspective, the forthcoming workshop between the Los Angeles Conservancy and the Yellin Co. will represent a test of the underlying cultural and ethical structure of Los Angeles.

It is crucial that adjacent to the plaza where Los Angeles was founded in 1781, and near the buildings that serve and memorialize the secular power of city, state and federal republic, there be at least one comparable structure pointing to something else, at least one monument signifying some other range of values equally necessary to the health of society, equally suggestive of the civic identity of a pueblo named in honor of the angels.

Preserving the mysterious alchemy of past, present and future as they coalesce in one shrine to a near-anonymous martyr must not be reduced to mere politics. The remains of a young woman, a forgotten martyr from the 3rd Century, are unearthed in Italy in 1853 and brought to an aspiring city on the far side of the world, where she is re-entombed in a new cathedral, through which the city wishes to express, among other things, its hopes for a richly developed metropolitan culture. The message of St. Vibiana herself is a message of tragedy and loss struggling toward renewal. St. Vibiana, martyr and shrine, remain; and so does Los Angeles. St. Vibiana, pray for us! St. Vibiana, pray for the City of Angels.