Students’ Work Opens Doors to Culture, History

Twelve-year-old Edward Rugerio recalled how surprised he was the first time he visited St. Basil Roman Catholic Church earlier this year. It was the stained-glass windows that floored him.

“Outside they look like nothing,” he said. But once inside the church, he said, the sun streamed through them, dappling the floor with dozens of colors.

Edward is a student at CityLife Downtown Charter School, and earlier this year he and the 75 other children then in the sixth grade visited eight landmark places of worship on or near Wilshire Boulevard.

They went to seven churches and a synagogue, learning the histories of the buildings and what they reveal about life in Los Angeles. Called the Sacred Spaces Project, the semester-long program was a collaboration between the charter school, now in its second year, and the Los Angeles Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that works to preserve the area’s historical, architectural and cultural resources.

The students saw the pool-like baptismal font at the Wilshire Christian Church, studied the lavish interiors of St. James Episcopal Church and Wilshire Boulevard Temple, and stared at Immanuel Presbyterian’s stenciled ceiling.

They took notes. Some took photos, and others sketched what they saw, including such memorable details as the enormous pipe organ at First Congregational Church and the Gothic ceiling at St. James.

Jacki Breger, who founded the charter school and is its executive director, said the project was ideal for a school that uses the city as its classroom. (The school is in the process of moving into new space near MacArthur Park.)

“The kids understand that buildings tell stories,” Breger said. “We can learn who and what came before us by studying buildings.”

With grants from the History Channel and Comcast, the students researched, wrote and illustrated a booklet, “The Sacred Spaces of Wilshire Boulevard: A Guide for Kids by Kids,” which the conservancy recently printed and hopes to make available to schools and cultural institutions.

The project was a revelation to many of the students, who didn’t realize faith came in so many different denominations. Few of the mostly Latino students had ever been inside a synagogue before. And most didn’t know that churches could look like St. Basil’s, a spiky cluster of 12 concrete columns honoring the 12 apostles and the 12 tribes of Israel.

Historian Catherine Gudis, director of education at the conservancy and an advisor to the project, said it was fascinating to watch the children explore the buildings.

Gudis visited St. Basil’s with the students. There, Breger pointed to the abstract windows, so different from the story-telling windows of more traditional churches, and asked: “What does this look like?”

“One girl said, ‘A Picasso painting!’ and she was absolutely right,” Gudis said.

The buildings’ varied styles encouraged the children to compare and contrast. The domed Wilshire Boulevard Temple sits next to St. Basil’s, said Gudis: “So we’ve got a 1929 Byzantine dome, and you look across the parking lot and you see these soaring concrete structures with sculptures between them, and even the shape of the concrete pillars is abstract.”

The children went online and used other resources to do research. They heard a talk by Alfred Willis, who wrote the text that accompanies Robert Berger’s photographs in the 2003 book “Sacred Spaces: Historic Houses of Worship in the City of Angels.” (An exhibit based on the book is currently at the Skirball Cultural Center). And at each of the churches and the synagogue, clergy or congregants spoke to them.

At Founders Church of Religious Science, designed by African American architect Paul Williams, the children discovered that what appears to be a stained-glass window is actually a mural painted on glass and illuminated by electric lights behind it.

The children loved Founders Church, a 1960 Protestant church without a cross or portrait of Christ, Gudis said: “When they got there for their tour, the woman leading it told them the church is round so there are no corners where the devil can hide.”

The houses of worship on Wilshire, Breger said, “are especially significant because they tell us about the westward movement” away from downtown Los Angeles during the 1920s and early ‘30s, when most of the churches were built.

Until recently, many of the once mostly white congregations had been shrinking as neighborhoods changed.

Now, in sanctuaries where worshipers once heard only English or Latin, services are also held in Tagalog, Korean and Spanish. Gudis described Immanuel Presbyterian Church as especially “open armed” in welcoming new groups of people. The Gothic revival church, with its traditional rose window and beautiful stained glass from the Judson Studios, now provides space for another charter school, a food pantry and the Gay Men’s Chorus.

Johnny Hernandez, 13, said he was bored at first, walking through religious buildings, but got more interested the more he learned. He was one of the students who attended a meeting at St. Basil’s to discuss preservation issues. The CityLife contingent urged church officials to seek city historic cultural monument status and offered to help with the application.

“We want to save the history,” Johnny said. “We want the future to know that this was an important church. I don’t think there’s a lot of history left.”

The church has yet to take the students up on their offer, Gudis said.

Student writers and editors had to polish draft after draft of the guide. The project boosted students’ vocabularies -- many had not previously encountered such church-related terms as “pew.”

And pew was one of the easy words. They also learned that the bimah, or bema, is the raised platform in a synagogue where the Torah is unrolled. And they are now able to dazzle friends and family by explaining that a transept is the crosswise part of a cross-shaped, or cruciform, church.

And no one who went to St. James will forget what a church’s nave is. Explained Fatima Cervantes, a 12-year-old editor: “The ceiling of the church is shaped like [the hull of] a boat to show us that God is with us through all the storms of life.”

Nave, the children explained, is from the Latin word for ship: navis.

Johnny said one of the things the buildings have in common is that they are almost always large.

“They are God’s house,” he said, and are designed to contrast the grandeur of God with the relative insignificance of humans.

Which may be why Fatima liked Precious Blood Church best of all. A Roman Catholic church, Italian Romanesque in style, Precious Blood has a glowing mural made from mosaic tile.

“It was a little smaller than the other ones,” she said, “and it made me feel kind of comfortable.”