Hollywood Beacon Gets New Guardian

Calling the Hollywood cross a beacon “greater than the city’s sin,” the affluent Church on the Way in Van Nuys has taken over the familiar but often-battered landmark, apparently ensuring that it will be maintained for years to come.

Since 1923, the lighted cross atop a ridge in Cahuenga Pass has caught the attention of Hollywood Bowl audiences and commuters on the Hollywood Freeway--at least whenever it wasn’t toppled or darkened by wind, fire, vandalism and church-state legal objections.

The cross--now 33 feet high--is such a prominent local landmark that it was incorporated into the Los Angeles County seal.

It was reconstructed most recently in 1993 by a shortwave radio evangelism group, the Simi Valley-based High Adventure Ministries led by George Otis Sr.

“We rebuilt the cross, using some of the remains of the [original] cross lying on the ground and putting it onto a concrete base,” said Todd Hacker, controller of High Adventure Ministries.

Otis, who is currently overseas, offered the cross to the 8,900-member Church on the Way, noting in a letter last year to Senior Pastor Jack Hayford that High Adventure had spent $110,000 to reconstruct the cross.

“As I said, we aren’t selling the Cross, but we would like to conserve at least a part of the investment we have made in it by making this request,” Otis wrote, saying that he was hoping to recoup at least $75,000 for other religious work.

The Van Nuys congregation came up not only with a $75,000 donation to High Adventure Ministries but with nearly $50,000 for an endowment fund to cover estimated maintenance costs of up to $5,000 a year, said John Farmer, an administrator at Church on the Way.

Otis sees the cross--which is visible for miles, shining brightly against a dark patch of hillside--as a rebuke to the reputation of the Hollywood area it overlooks, Hacker said.

Hayford, who was unavailable for comment this week, struck similar notes in seeking money from his congregation, describing the cross as “louder than the freeways’ din, greater than the city’s sin . . . radiating the world’s one abiding hope where pain and loss have brought shame and ruin.”

The Hollywood cross was first erected as a memorial to Christine Wetherell Stevenson, the heiress to the Pittsburgh Paint fortune who helped arrange construction of the Hollywood Bowl.

In 1920, Stevenson chose 29 acres across from the Bowl for an open-air theater as the setting for “The Pilgrimage Play,” which she had written about Jesus. She died two years later, and admirers planted a cross as a memorial to her on a hill above the theater.

After a fire destroyed that theater, a concrete theater was built in 1931 to revive her play. The theater and the cross were donated in 1941 to Los Angeles County.

The play ran until 1964 when the first of a series of lawsuits, citing constitutional church-state issues, challenged the county’s sponsorship of the religious theater and production.

A year later, the cross was damaged by fire. The county replaced it with a steel-and-plexiglass structure and routinely lit the cross at Easter. But that governmental support was halted in 1980 by a lawsuit that successfully contended that the county violated the 1st Amendment by maintaining the cross at public expense.

The church-state conflict was resolved in 1984 when Marian N. Gibbons, president of Hollywood Heritage, bought the cross’ site.

Meanwhile, the cross, unused and unguarded, was damaged by vandals and a windstorm. Volunteers raised a 17-foot cross on the small plot in 1985, but it wasn’t until 1993 that High Adventure Ministries built the current structure.

In taking over the cross, marked by an April ceremony at its base, elders of the Church on the Way have recommended that other Christian ministries and churches be invited to join the effort as a way of countering possible complaints.

As a result, a board of trustees for the cross endowment fund is being formed with representatives of the Foursquare Gospel denomination, to which Church on the Way belongs, and churches involved in the multiethnic Love L.A. pastors fellowship that is led by Hayford.