The Rev. David Brown walked through a shady tunnel of mature redwood trees, past a trio of tourists taking photos, and into Wayfarers Chapel for the weekly Wednesday afternoon prayer service.
“Militant atheists who believe in nothing feel something in our chapel,” Brown said of the 100-seat glass and wood sanctuary designed by architect Lloyd Wright for the Church of Sweden in 1951. “The chapel is a gem mid-century architecture. People may have never read our theology, but just by walking into Wayfarers Chapel, they are experiencing a core part of our theology. “The natural world corresponds to the spiritual.”
The US government agrees. On December 13, after a five-year review process, the Secretary of the Interior voted to classify Wayfarers Chapel as a National Historic Landmark. It joins the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, the Gamble House in Pasadena, Watts Towers and a handful of other sites in Los Angeles that are identified as national landmarks.
Wayfarers Chapel is located among a redwood forest overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Rancho Palos Verdes.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The church was built as a monument to Emanuel Swedishborg, an 18th-century Swedish philosopher and mystic, and dedicated to travelers in need of spiritual support.
For more than 70 years, traveling “travellers” who stopped along the Palos Verdes Peninsula to visit the ocean-view chapel have dubbed the chapel “the glass church.” (The church takes the chapel's distinctive architecture and legacy seriously, and on Jan. 25, church leaders filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles accusing Calamigos Ranch in Malibu of trademark and image infringement commercial, including the design of the chapel's “circular altar” and the double (Y-shaped stem mullions in the chapel's glass side walls). But the chapel was conceived by Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright and an accomplished landscape designer, such as a chapel in a tree that helps people feel a connection with God and nature. .
Standing in the chapel, art and nature are one as the lines between inside and outside dissolve. “The chapel makes it easy to find the divine in nature,” Brown said of the view of redwoods and the plant-filled interior. (In the 1950s, the chapel even featured a hanging garden. “That ended when a snake fell from one of the hanging plants,” Brown said.)
Undeterred by the onlookers who have made the chapel one of the most Instagrammed churches in Los Angeles, Brown said he never knows what he will find when he leaves his office and crosses the parking lot to the chapel.
“There's everything from people taking selfies to post on Instagram to someone who is ready to commit suicide,” Brown said. “You never know what you're going to find. Especially since the last economic crisis.”
Visitors are framed by the arched front door of the Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Brown estimates that more than 300,000 people visited the chapel last year and about 400 couples were married in the light-filled sanctuary, a drop from pre-pandemic levels. Celebrity nuptials include Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay in 1958 and Brian Wilson and Melinda Ledbetter of the Beach Boys in 1995. Four years after the Wilson-Ledbetter nuptials, the chapel hosted 800 weddings. “Visitors have told me they remember seeing Jayne Mansfield being taken to the limousine,” Brown said.
Meanwhile, the chapel, which cost $25,000 to build in 1951, is showing signs of wear due in part to its salinity-rich seaside location. Without a formal congregation to make weekly donations like other churches, Brown said he hopes the designation will help with his current $8 million capital improvement campaign.
“Being right next to the ocean and the salt air has been corrosive,” Brown said. “It requires an intense amount of restoration.”
The path to Wayfarers Chapel, which offers views of the Pacific Ocean, to the left, is lined with redwoods.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
When the chapel opened its doors decades ago, access along the Palos Verdes Peninsula was via a gravel road and a day's drive from downtown Los Angeles. Today, a constant stream of tourists, funerals, memorials, baptisms and weddings have made it one of the most photographed places of worship in Southern California.
“The designation raises awareness and status and definitely puts us on the map globally,” Brown said. “It is an honor and a privilege to witness how powerful this sacred space can be. It brings the outdoors inside and that speaks to a lot of people. I have met enough people over the years to know that it is a healing place and I don't use the word lightly. “I have witnessed small miracles in this space.”
