The Wayfarer's Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes was designed by Lloyd Wright. It has become an international destination for weddings as well as a place to enjoy nature.
60 years ago, actor Charles Laughton spoke at the dedication of the cornerstorne for the Wayfarers Chapel, the spectacular wood-and-glass church overlooking the sea near Abalone Cove in Rancho Palos Verdes. Two years later, the structure was completed, with the first service held on May 13, 1951
The beauty of the chapel inspired author Anais Nin to write the following after visiting the chapel during its twenty-fifth anniversary celebration:
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 the glass expanded the spirit,
let it loose among the clouds and in nature.
What a poetic 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.
Peninsula resident and Swedenborgian Church member Elizabeth Sewall Schellenberg first envisioned building such a chapel in the 1920s as a tribute to the church's founder, eighteenth-century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. (For more on the Swedenborgian religion: http://www.swedenborg.org/beliefs.cfm.)
Architect Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright's son, brought the various ideas for the chapel into reality.
Notables married at the Wayfarers Chapel over the years include actress Jayne Mansfield, who married bodybuilder Nicky Hargitay there in January 1958, Beach Boy Brian Wilson, actor Dennis Hopper, astronaut Anna Fisher and Governor and Mrs. Earl Warren.
Other stars spotted there over the years as guests included Debbie Reynolds, Patricia Nixon, Carroll O'Connor and Bob Hope.
Source: The Beauty of Holiness: Story of the Wayfarers Chapel, by former chapel minister Ernest Martin, published by The Donning Company in 2007.
For further information and photos, visit http://www.wayfarerschapel.org/.
Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.
I recall attending the laying of the cornerstone, and Charles Laughton reading from the Bible. I was just 17 at the time. I was standing next to the seated Ethel Barrymore, and I was duly impressed, but not so impressed as I was after seeing the Wayfarer's Chapel after its construction two years later. It was truly inspiring. My father, Swedenborgian minister Rev. Walter Brown Murray, who died two years prior, would have been so delighted to see that Chapel. I met Lloyd Wright after his lecture at the Los Angeles Church at 5th and Westmoreland. What a wonderful concept that Elizabeth Schellenberg envisioned, and how wonderful it was for architect Lloyd Wright to fulfill that dream so expertly.