For the entire time I've lived in the Los Angeles area (nearly 14 years now), there's been one building at Heritage Square Museum I haven't been able to get into.
All the mansions and the former train depot have posed no problem—but the former Lincoln Avenue Methodist Church, on the other hand, was a longtime holdout.
After all, it had been cut into six pieces and moved from Pasadena to Montecito Heights in Northeast LA (about eight miles, taking surface streets) in 1981. And it just hasn't been stable enough to be able to withstand visitors—until now.
Built in 1897 and formerly located at the southeast corner of Orange Grove Boulevard and Lincoln Avenue, this Carpenter Gothic structure was designed by architect George W. Kramer in the "Akron" style of architecture (as in Akron, Ohio), typical of Methodist churches of the time.
It follows a non-axial floor plan, with the front door and pulpit in opposite corners from one another.
The interior still looks really rough—its wooden laths exposed, lacking in plaster and a proper coat of paint.
And it wasn't until I got inside that I realized the "stained glass" windows weren't real. The colors come from tinted film that's been added to the glass—reportedly by a Hollywood production company to prepare the location for a shoot. Maybe one day the museum can finally replicate the original leaded glass windows.
It's a huge victory to be able to open the church and host events there (like the production of Sancta Susanna I saw just before Halloween)—and well worth the wait.
Too many historic structures don't make it—and this church almost disappeared entirely when the United States Postal Service purchased it in 1979 and, despite using it as a distribution center, planned to demolish it to built a new post office facility and parking lot in its place.
By that point, it hadn't been a church for a dozen years—having been converted into the Lincoln Avenue Methodist Social Service Center in 1967. The congregation had dwindled too much to keep it a church by that point—20 years after the parish had become racially integrated, and white parishioners had fled in protest.
Nowadays, you can find anything from yard sales and kitten adoptions to ballets, horror operas, and spooky storytelling shows taking place inside the "abandoned" church.
I love that I've lived in LA long enough to see some doors open again—especially ones I thought would be locked forever. Of course, there are lots of doors that get locked forever—and torn off the hinges by a bulldozer, or incinerated by fire—but these small, significant victories make me happy.
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