Judge Bars Swift Demolition of Cathedral

In sharp rebuke to the Los Angeles City Council and Roman Catholic archdiocese, a Superior Court judge ruled Friday that St. Vibiana’s Cathedral cannot be torn down quickly even though the downtown church is no longer a formal city landmark.

The decision represented another legal victory for the Los Angeles Conservancy, which hopes to preserve the 120-year-old church despite the City Council’s 14-1 vote last week to strip St. Vibiana’s of its landmark status.

Criticizing the City Council’s action, Judge Robert H. O’Brien said that the church remains a historically significant building and that state law requires a thorough environmental impact study before its demolition. O’Brien ruled that the city’s brief environmental report supporting razing was “inadequate.”

“Indeed, there is substantial evidence showing that demolition . . . may have a significant effect on the environment by virtue of having the universally proclaimed historical structure on the property demolished,” the judge wrote in his seven-page decision.

Citing legal problems and other delays, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony on Monday announced that he was abandoning plans to construct a new cathedral at the old one’s 2nd and Main streets site and would build the $50-million project somewhere else downtown. But Mahony said he still wanted to raze the quake-damaged cathedral and sell the land.

Linda Dishman, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, was delighted by the court ruling. “I think this provides us one more opportunity to save this building,” she said.

Archdiocese attorney John McNicholas said he was “rather shocked” by O’Brien’s decision and would seek an emergency writ of appeal next week. The city attorney’s office is also considering a similar move. The church and city are appealing a separate but related decision by O’Brien last month that protected the cathedral.

The judge Friday said the archdiocese’s arguments about freedom of religion were not convincing enough to override state law. The City Council’s vote was irrelevant, the judge wrote, because state rules “protect historical resources whether they are formally listed” as a landmark or not.

Conservancy attorney Jack Rubens said Friday’s legal victory and previous ones showed that the archdiocese’s attempts to discredit preservation efforts were a smoke screen for its own failure to follow state law.