St. Vibiana’s Removed From Landmarks List

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday stripped St. Vibiana’s Cathedral of its landmark status, but a judge later blocked efforts by church officials to immediately demolish the 120-year-old building.

The council’s 14-1 vote to remove St. Vibiana’s from the city list of historic-cultural landmarks touched off another series of fast-moving events involving the downtown cathedral. Within two hours of the council action, the archdiocese received a city permit to raze the entire church, which it wants to replace with a $50-million cathedral complex.

However, the Los Angeles Conservancy once again raced to court to save the Spanish baroque church from demolition. The conservancy hopes that the old earthquake-damaged church can be repaired and incorporated into the new cathedral complex at 2nd and Main streets.

In its emergency lawsuit, the conservancy contended that the so-called “de-landmarking” required a thorough environmental impact study, not the short report the city prepared in a few days to meet state laws.

Superior Court Judge Robert O’Brien granted a temporary restraining order against demolition until a July 25 hearing.

On June 19, O’Brien issued a preliminary injunction against demolition, saying the city first must conduct an environmental impact review because the church was a landmark. The conservancy requested that action after the archdiocese started to take down the bell tower June 1. Claiming its religious liberty was being violated, the archdiocese appealed the decision.

City and church officials contended Wednesday that the June 19 order is moot now that St. Vibiana’s is no longer a city-designated landmark. Any cultural loss, they argued, will be compensated by including stained glass windows and artifacts from the old church in the new one.

Without the judge’s latest order, the archdiocese would have resumed demolition today, church attorney John P. McNicholas said. If the restraining order is lifted next week, “we will move expeditiously,” he added.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has threatened to move the cathedral to another site, possibly out of downtown, if preservationists succeed in delaying his plans. The cardinal is expected to hold to his July 22 deadline for a decision about the location, an archdiocese spokesman said.

The conservancy alleged in court papers Wednesday that the council vote was a “desperate attempt to meet the archdiocese’s self-imposed deadline.” It argued that the cathedral’s historic, cultural and architectural significance “cannot be ignored or marginalized in an attempt to appease the archdiocese.”

Attorney Jack H. Rubens, representing the conservancy, said he might appeal if O’Brien lifts the new restraining order.

Richard Holguin, chief of the city’s engineering bureau, said a demolition permit was issued Wednesday for the entire cathedral, not just the bell tower. Separate permits will be needed for the adjacent rectory and classroom buildings that were never landmarks, he said.

As in a preliminary vote last month, Councilman Joel Wachs cast the sole vote against taking the church off the landmark list. He said the Los Angeles landmark protection ordinance is weaker than those of most big cities and the council action guts it further. The rules can delay demolition for a year, but do not ban it.

“I just can’t ever see a reason of having one group or one person, no matter how highly we think of them, not have to go through the process,” he said.

Councilwoman Rita Walters, whose district includes the cathedral and who sponsored the motion, said the old cathedral would remain a derelict hulk for 50 or 70 years if the archdiocese does not receive quick permission to tear it down and construct a new cathedral. The project, she said, will help revitalize the neighborhood “and not have it just as an area of drunks and prostitutes and the untoward things that occur in the city.”

Walters sought to refute complaints from preservationists that the cardinal was receiving special treatment. The archdiocese, Walters said, was not seeking land or money from the city, just the right to “spend their own money on their own land.”

The proposal to remove the cathedral from the landmark list generated about two dozen written responses denouncing the plan. The letters and petitions, released Wednesday by the city Community Redevelopment Agency, were from such groups as the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the state Office of Historic Preservation.

Yale University professor Vincent Scully, considered one of the nation’s leading architectural historians, wrote that he was “shocked and saddened by the determination with which St. Vibiana’s destruction is being pursued by those agencies which, one would think, ought to be cherishing this old building most dearly.”

Landmarks like the church, Scully wrote, “count the most. They embody the beginnings, the oldest memories, the founding principles upon which the city was formed.”