Added to the National Register of Historic Places July 11, 2005; designated a National Historic Landmark on December 11, 2023   

UPDATE 2/16/24: On February 15, 2024 the Wayfarers Chapel announced that it was closing to the public indefinitely due to the alarmingly rapid movement of the land underneath it. This is happening all over the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and it’s only accelerated due to the atmospheric river earlier in the winter. Old cracks are re-emerging in the chapel floor and several panes of glass in the chapel are cracked. They’ve had to cancel confirmed wedding reservations. If you’d like to help with recovery efforts, you can donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/wayfarers

There is so much to admire about the Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes. Situated on top of a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the chapel would be majestic if it were made of stacks of cardboard pizza boxes. But architect Lloyd Wright designed the perfect structure for the site, at once rooted in the stones and trees that surround the chapel, and light enough to take flight from that rocky outcropping above Abalone Cove.

Visually speaking, there’s no way around superlatives here. Wayfarers Chapel is just too stunning. From the outside it looks like a shimmering beetle with an exoskeleton of redwood and glass. From the inside, it’s a marvel of symmetry and elemental shapes, all triangles and circles and kites, with intricate framing that yields shifting patterns of light and shadow depending on the time of day. 

There is also this undeniable sense of – something when you’re inside, and given the chance to exist in that space, hopefully without too much chatter around you. Some would call the feeling spiritual awe. This chapel is a Swedenborgian Christian church after all, though it’s a church with no regular congregation, and it’s open to anyone. I interpret the feeling as a merging of humankind and nature through the prism of the chapel. It feels protective, but also porous, like you’re inside the redwoods and sky. It’s a feeling I haven’t felt inside many other buildings.  

Chapel Vision

The seeds of the Wayfarers Chapel were planted (metaphorically speaking) decades before it was dedicated in 1951. It was the brainchild of Mrs. Elizabeth Schellenberg, an early resident of Palos Verdes in the 1920s, just as the peninsula was developing (for more on that story, see Etan Does LA visit #109). Schellenberg was an adherent of the Swedenborgian Church, a small Christian sect inspired by the theology of Swedish scientist and mystic, Emmanual Swedenborg. She imagined a private chapel with its doors open for quiet prayer and meditation to passersby of any faith.

At the time, the entire 16,000 acre Palos Verdes peninsula was owned by a wealthy New York family, the Vanderlips. Its patriarch Frank Vanderlip was a mega-successful banker. When not developing massive tracts of land, he led the company that would become Citibank, co-founded the Federal Reserve, and in his spare time started the first Montessori school in the US on the Vanderlips’ massive estate Beachwood, right on the Hudson River. Frank’s wife Narcissa Cox Vanderlip was a badass, too. She was a powerful voice for women’s suffrage as chair of the New York State League of Women Voters from 1919 to 1923, and convinced her friend Eleanor Roosevelt to join its board. Narcissa was also a devoted Swedenborgian, and donated the 3.5-acre parcel above Abalone Cove to realize Elizabeth Schellenberg’s dream. 

Courting the Jester

In the late ‘30s, Narcissa approached a young architect named Ralph Jester about designing the chapel. Jester had become friendly with the Vanderlips while attending Yale in the ‘20s; he later studied architecture in Paris, then art at Columbia. During his studies, Jester made an acquaintance of Frank Lloyd Wright’s niece, who got him an invitation to apprentice at Taliesin, the famous architectural commune in Wisconsin run by Wright. But Jester opted to go into Hollywood set design instead, first working for United Artists and then for Paramount on films like the 1934 Cleopatra. He moved from New York to Palos Verdes, rented the caretaker’s cottage on the Vanderlips’ estate, and commuted to Hollywood for work each day. Later he would transition into costume design, and earned Oscar nominations alongside Edith Head for their work on The Ten Commandments and The Buccaneer in the ‘50s. 

Back to the Wayfarers Chapel: in the late 1930s, Ralph Jester drew up plans for a mission revival-style church. But WWII broke out before construction began, and it wasn’t until a decade later that work on the church resumed. After reviewing his old drawings in the late ‘40s, Jester suggested that his architect pal Lloyd Wright – the son of Frank Lloyd Wright – might do a better job. To humanity’s everlasting delight, Lloyd Wright said yes in 1948. 

Fun sidebar: Ralph Jester’s life would continue to intersect with the Wrights’ over the years. Frank Lloyd Wright designed him a doozy of a house in 1938, his first building made largely of circular interiors. Jester demurred when he found out how much it would cost to build the thing, and Wright unsuccessfully pitched it to nine more clients over the years. Eventually, Frank Lloyd Wright archivist Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer built the house for himself and his dad in 1971, near the Taliesin West campus in Scottsdale, AZ. Jester did end up building a house designed by Lloyd Wright in 1948, the same year the younger Wright started work on the Wayfarers Chapel. 

Building the Wayfarers Chapel Complex               

On his way down to Los Angeles just before he was offered the Wayfarers commission, Lloyd Wright stopped at a café situated in an old redwood grove in northern California. The revelatory experience of being surrounded by these massive, ancient trees stuck with him. He was inspired to create a “tree chapel” with his Wayfarers design, a sacred space in the midst of protective tree cover. 

Wright’s initial vision for the chapel was unanimously accepted by the Swedenborgians, and it’s no wonder, given how well his “organic architecture” philosophy meshed with the Swedenborg Church’s reverence for God’s natural world. Every aspect of Wright’s design for the chapel expresses the harmony of building and landscape. The redwood frames of the chapel merge with the redwood trees themselves. Blue terracotta tiles on the roof blend in with the sky. The stones that swath the foundation, sheath the bell tower and line the walls and walkways are all local Palos Verdes stone. When you’re inside the chapel, the large expanses of ¼” thick safety glass virtually disappear, uniting the interior and exterior; the rhododendrons, azaleas and ferns that grow both outside and inside the chapel complete the illusion that you’re praying on a forest floor.  From a distance, the Wayfarers Chapel seems invisible, swallowed by the canopy of trees. 

The Wayfarers Chapel complex was constructed in phases. The cornerstone was dedicated on July 16, 1949 in a ceremony that included a reading of the 107th psalm by actor Charles Laughton. On May 13th, 1951 the chapel itself was dedicated; three years later came the “Hallelujah Tower,” a 50-foot bell tower of concrete, stone and terracotta tile that holds a golden cross so high and shiny that sailors can see it at night. 

In 1958, the covered colonnade was completed along the bluffside, connecting the chapel and the original visitors’ center from the same year; Wright also finished an outdoor amphitheater that year, just north of the colonnade. A landslide In 1982 unsettled the fill underneath the visitors’ center, and eventually it was demolished. Sad, but not too sad, since now anyone in the amphitheater has an unobstructed view of the Pacific Ocean.

Yet Another Wright

1978 was a big year for the Wayfarers Chapel. A 16-bell carillon was added to the hallelujah tower. A small annex was built to the east of the original visitors’ center, with offices for the ministers. And on May 31, 1978, Lloyd Wright died, and his son Eric officially took over as consulting architect on the Wayfarers Chapel: a third generation of Wrights attached to the chapel’s story.

Eric’s first order of business was to finish the loggia, a 193-square-foot glass office at the eastern base of the chapel that was the last thing Lloyd Wright designed for Wayfarers. He also created the hood-like celebration lights (available for sponsorship!) that have dotted the gardens since 1989. Most recently, Eric designed the new visitors’ center on the north end of the parking lot, which was dedicated on May 20th 2001, almost exactly 50 years after the chapel itself was formally opened to the wayfaring public. 

Conclusion

While you’re there it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the beauty of the Wayfarers Chapel, its surrounding redwood and pine and toyon trees, and the glittering water of Abalone Cove, just below. Right now though, after digging through the history of this place, I’m most impressed with Lloyd Wright’s foresight. You look at photos from 1951, the year the chapel itself was completed and formally dedicated, and the cliffside is dusty and bare. Wright had to imagine how sheltering it would feel, decades after he planted redwood saplings to surround the chapel…he had to intuit how the entire complex would integrate with the hillside after the gardens had grown in. Just extraordinary. 

I’ll leave you with this wonderful excerpt from a diary entry by Anaïs Nin, who was married to Lloyd Wright’s stepson Rupert Pole for a decade. She captures the appeal of the Wayfarers Chapel beautifully.

We visited Lloyd Wright’s completed chapel at Palos Verdes, near Los Angeles. The sun was pouring into it like a million saints’ halos, the sea was glittering beyond the glass, the redwood trees were beginning to peep into the church. The beauty of glass expended the spirit, let it loose among the clouds and in nature. What a concept of a church. Not to enclose, in dimness, in stone, in tombs, with votive candles burning, but to free the spirit, to follow the clouds, to glitter with the sea, to grow from the earth richly scented with flowers and leaves. Incense and earth smells, the earth smell stronger.

-Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947-1955, accessed via Google Books

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Wayfarers Chapel’s NRHP nomination form

+Wayfarers Chapel history (wayfarerschapel.org)

+Wayfarers Chapel (Los Angeles Conservancy)

+Hollywood Legend Ralph Jester in Palos Verdes by Local Resident Lee Jester (Palos Verdes Pulse, 2022)

+Hollywood’s Glittering Golden Past Remains in Palos Verdes as Lloyd Wright’s Jester House in Portuguese Bend Finds a New Owner by Dana Graham (Palos Verdes Pulse, 2021)