Grand Plans to Build the Last California Mission in Tujunga

John Steven McGroarty was, in his time, a famous writer. He came to Tujunga in 1901 and built a home in a fold of the Verdugo Mountains. He had a successful career as a columnist for the LA Times, was the poet laureate of California for over a decade, was a two-term state representative and wrote several plays. Above all, he was a visionary who was obsessed with a romantic notion of the California missions.

In 1911, he wrote the highly successful “Mission Play.” It was performed for decades to legions of tourists, presenting a sanitized history of the California missions. The Mission Playhouse in San Gabriel was built by McGroarty specifically as a venue for the play.

In 1921 he laid out a grand scheme to build an entirely new mission in Tujunga, to be both a tribute to the California mission legend and a major tourist attraction. According to his plan, it would be the 22^nd mission in the chain of missions. It would be run by the Franciscans, as of old, and would be named Mission San Juan Evangelista. The extensive mission structures were to be built on a couple of acres of public park located just below McGroarty’s home. (The site today is McGroarty Park.) Above it all a giant cross would grace the top of the Verdugos.

McGroarty was well connected and able to pull in lots of donations. Marshall Hartranft, the developer who founded most of today’s Tujunga, owned Oak Grove Park located below McGroarty’s home. He volunteered to donate that land for the mission site, and create a new park elsewhere. Other rich men got in line to make donations. One was to supply all the cement needed for construction. Another would purchase mission bells specially made in Spain. A woman pledged to donate the altar.

McGroarty even secured the donated services of noted architect Arthur Benton, famed for his mission revival designs (San Gabriel’s Mission Playhouse was one). He was to draw up the plans for San Juan Evangelista in a Moorish style similar to Mission San Luis Rey. McGroarty was having no problem garnering donations for his ambitious plans.

And ambitious they truly were, both in the scale of the project, a full-size mission, and in its execution. For the construction of the mission was to be a grand spectacle in itself, carried out with faux historical accuracy. One hundred Native Americans would be recruited from several California Indian Reservations as costumed laborers. They would work under the direction of actual brown-robed Franciscan padres. In a “living history” tableau, they would form adobe bricks, make red roof tile from clay deposits in the Verdugo Mountains, and cut logs from high up in Big Tujunga Canyon, to be carried down by hand, all for the entertainment of visiting tourists. (Sorry guys, the cynic in me just has to wonder if they would also have mounted soldiers to run down and lasso anyone who left the worksite without permission, to be then dragged back, and tied to a post where a priest would pretend to flog them. To be fair to McGroarty, he did not have the historical perspective we have today.)

The mission was projected to take a couple of years and the dedication would be even grander than the construction spectacle. A chorus of 500 voices, scores of trumpeters, and cannon blasts would open the mission while an assembled 100,000 spectators looked on. It would be a huge tourist draw, a win for the community.

So what happened? Where’s our mission?

Well, for one thing, McGroarty’s house burned down about then so he had to refocus his efforts there. Another was that his Mission Playhouse in San Gabriel was beginning construction, requiring his attention. And maybe it was just too crazy a large project.

What did happen though was the big cross on the hill. It’s still there today, San Ysidro Cross, overlooking the valley. The mission’s proposed site is a park and McGroarty’s house is now a venue for budding artists, the beautiful McGroarty Arts Center. And maybe that’s better than a replica mission.