Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 2, 1987

“The Art of Living: Kirtan & Meditation, Mon – Sat 7 PM” announces the marquee outside the magnificent neoclassical building at 948 W. Adams Boulevard. Not the kind of sober activities you’d expect to take place in a building that was once touted by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the most costly and artistic houses of worship west of New York.” But times have changed, and Christian Science isn’t the hot new denomination on the block that it was a century ago. A building this glorious is built for instilling a sense of spiritual uplift. Why not chanting and guided meditations, instead of hymns to Jesus and the weekly bible reading?

This house of worship was built for a small congregation of Christian Science adherents in Los Angeles, founded as an LA branch of the Christian Science “Mother Church” in Boston. The 25 charter members formally incorporated on June 20, 1898. They weren’t the first Christian Science group in LA – another congregation incorporated just a month before, and built themselves a small classical revival church in 1901 on 17th Street, on a stretch that’s now covered by the 10 freeway.

For their first 12 years, the Second Church of Christ, Scientist congregation met at various halls in LA, a stopgap before they could amass the funds and the numbers to warrant a permanent home. In 1904 they pooled their resources and purchased two lots in the fashionable Belgravia Tract for $20,000. 

To build their new home the congregation hired Alfred F. Rosenheim, a respected architect who moved from St. Louis to LA just a couple years before the church commission. He had recently turned heads with the massive steel-frame Hellman Building downtown, and then the Hamburger and Sons Department Store, said to be the largest department store west of Chicago at the time.

Rosenheim continued his monumental bent with the church on W. Adams, building what the Los Angeles Times described in a 1908 preview as “the largest and most elaborate church west of Chicago.” No doubt, Rosenheim and his employers had Boston’s neoclassical Mother Church in mind when they envisioned the new edifice. An imposing portico greets you with Greco-Roman grace, its six fluted columns soaring up 40 feet into intricate Corinthian capitals, and topped by the kind of decorated pediment you’d find in ancient Rome. Crowning the building is a ribbed dome, sheathed in copper and 70 feet in diameter. It was called “the largest concrete dome ever constructed” by the Los Angeles Times in 1910 (clearly, the Times was given to hyperbole). 

The inside of the church is no less luxe. Once you enter the mahogany doors, you’re in a narrow vestibule with tiled floors and veined marble wainscoting, lit by wall sconces and pendant lights hanging from the vaulted ceiling. Continue on into the lobby, past the marble fireplaces and the side parlors, and you’ll encounter staircases leading up to the main sanctuary beneath the dome. It’s an awe-inspiring space, 90-feet from the floor to the apex of the dome. Originally the sanctuary was designed to fit 1200 worshipers, with no side galleries or any objects ruining the view from pew to pulpit. A Murray Harris pipe organ is hidden behind a decorative screen above the raised pulpit. In addition to a series of four brass chandeliers and wall sconces, a halo of arched stained glass windows lets in natural light from the dome above. Beneath the sanctuary is a much simpler hall supported by mahogany posts, originally used for Sunday school.

Rosenheim and structural engineer AC Martin built the church’s foundation out of gray granite and the church itself out of reinforced concrete (still a fairly new innovation in the early 1900s), ensuring that it would last through the ages like the Roman monuments that inspired it. The exterior was covered in glazed white brick and decorative terracotta. 

The first services at the Second Church of Christ, Scientist were held in January of 1910. Following Christian Science tradition, it wasn’t formally dedicated until September 11, after the full $318,000 construction cost had been paid and the congregation was debt free.

The church on W. Adams was built at a formative time in Christian Science’s history. In 1910 membership was expanding throughout the US and abroad. This was just one of 12 churches undergoing construction in California between 1905 and 1908. At the same time, the church was sustaining attacks from the press (e.g. Georgine Milmine & Willa Cather’s highly critical The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science, published serially in McClure’s magazine from 1907-8), and its founder Mary Baker Eddy was accused of mental instability in a lawsuit brought by her own family. She died in late 1910, just a few months after the W. Adams church was formally dedicated.

The Second Church of Christ, Scientist congregation continued to go strong for decades. After WWII though, membership in Christian Science began to decline. According to a 2009 article in the Christian Science Monitor, more new members came from Africa than the US in 2008. In late 2009, facing both dwindling membership and increased maintenance costs, the Christian Scientists sold the building to The Art of Living Foundation, a non-denominational organization “dedicated to meditation and emotional self-control as the keys to peaceful and cooperative living,” according to the Foundation’s Rajshree Patel. They lead meditation and yoga seminars, teach emotional self-awareness to high school students, hold peace conferences and concerts, that kind of thing. 

The church on W. Adams is also an occasional backdrop for film/TV shoots. The Wicked City series used it as a stand-in for a library in 2015, and more recently Perry Mason transformed it into the Radiant Assembly of God, a fictional evangelical temple meant to evoke Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple in Echo Park. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Art of Living website

+ Bariscale, Floyd B.: “No. 57 – Second Church of Christ Scientist of Los Angeles” (Big Orange Landmarks, August 21, 2007)

+ Blake, Lindsay: “The ‘Wicked City’ Library” (IAmNotAStalker.com, January 5, 2016)

+ Brennan, Matt: “The new ‘Perry Mason’ re-creates L.A.’s 1930s history. Here’s how they did it” (Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2020)

+ Bryant, Christa Case: “Africa contributes biggest share of new members to Christian Science church” (The Christian Science Monitor, June 9, 2009)

+ “Fine Temple of Scientists” (Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1910 – accessed via ProQuest)

+ “Magnificent Scientist Church Assuming Shape” (Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1908 – accessed via ProQuest)

+ “Marvelous Work in Reinforced Concrete Found in Local Church” (Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1908 – accessed via ProQuest)

+ McAvoy, Christy Johnson & Leslie Heumann: Second Church of Christ, Scientist’s NRHP nomination form

+ Newman, Morris: “Meditation and Yoga Heading to Former Christian Science Building” (Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2010)