240 Years of Second Chances: Examining SoCal’s Missions by Rail

by Ken Layne

Created as imperial outposts and harvesters of native souls, the Spanish missions have had more lives than any structures in the state’s history. They were fortresses and agricultural laboratories, architecture schools and death camps, abandoned by Europe and then Mexico, given away as political favors and commandeered by the Yankee’s occupation army, left to the elements and then romanticized as the only pure historical California, while simultaneously serving as our own guilty memorials to the destruction of the native people’s earthly paradise on the coast. The missions gave birth to the stately campuses of Stanford and the crummy roadside Southwest of Taco Bell. They’ve got a lot to answer for.

The Alta California missions were famously spaced a day’s ride from each other, forming a chain of the first permanent buildings in the state. With a quarter millennium between the founding of those first church-and-rancho complexes and our own faded era, transportation technology has advanced enough that you can travel between missions in just a half-day, depending on traffic.

Or, if you want a European-style castles-and-trains holiday without the flight across the Atlantic, it can be done on commuter trains. I set out from San Bernardino’s handsome old “Mission Revival” Santa Fe station on a Saturday afternoon, with nobody troubling the grand 1918 building but a few volunteers closing the railroad museum for the day.

Southern California’s depots were among the first public buildings to get the Mission Revival architectural treatment, just as millions of new residents from New England and the Midwest flooded into the golden state on a wave of Chamber of Commerce property-boom hype and free oranges and Sunset Magazine nostalgia for the time of ranchos and padres. Those big crumbling adobe churches in every coastal California town were the only reminders of a time before the real estate hustle and the housing tract, even if that time had stumbled to its end before the Gold Rush brought the first waves of Anglo migration to the West Coast.

How a community treats its architectural landmarks might not be a reliable indicator of economic strength, but it’s a foolproof way to gauge a town’s soul. In San Bernardino, the soaring Moorish-Mission depot sits alone amongst dreary industrial buildings and dirt lots. The weekday commuters who use the Metrolink trains are directed to sterile ticket-vending machines out on the concrete platform, rather than inside the elaborately tiled waiting rooms and station lobby.

I board my empty train car and find a seat on the upper deck. As the train starts rolling, an exhausted-looking woman about my age sits in front of me and begins telling her life story between laughs and sobs. Unemployed for two years now, she lost her home to foreclosure before the fad began in 2008, attends a vocational college in hopes of getting a job at a public utility, suffers vague chronic health problems, and has four grown children who had once brought her great joy. She religiously watches the consumer-finance guru Suze Orman on cable television and offers much advice learned from the television program.

Through all this drama, I forget to look for Mission San Gabriel from my perch on the second level of the Metrolink. I had decided to only visit missions accessible by public transportation—getting in a car would make it just another numbing Southern California commute—and there was no easy way to traverse the five miles from the El Monte train station to the distant San Gabriel mission using spotty weekend bus service.

At Union Station, the last of the great depots and a stunning mix of Mission Revival and Art Deco/Streamline Moderne, a concerted decades-long effort by city and regional government has paid off in an elegant old train station that is once again a living heart of Los Angeles—L.A. has a dozen or more hearts, but this one is the most egalitarian. Even on the weekend, the depot is crowded with locals using the Metro lines and commuter services, while snaking lines of people board the Amtrak lines headed east and the lobby restaurant and courtyard are busy as always with wedding parties. I cross Alameda and Olvera to the sub-mission—the Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles Asistencia—that was first built in 1784 as an adjunct to the larger San Gabriel Mission, a half-day’s horseback ride to the east.

Today the church is a bustling spiritual and community center for the Latino Catholics living around downtown, free from the cold glamor of the new Our Lady of the Angels cathedral perched over the nearby Hollywood Freeway. The Claretian missionaries, clad in purple padre robes for Pentecost, greet the arriving families. I enter La Placita—the little church built here in 1784, 1822 and finally 1861—and stand for Mass while a procession of priests and brothers and guitarists makes its way to the altar. Mariachi musicians and vendors from Olvera Street slip in through the side doors and take their places in the pews. A Nigerian priest reads from First Corinthians in heavily accented Spanish. This well-worn church was the center of the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s, when the Claretian brothers stayed loyal to their mission of human rights by protecting refugees from Washington’s wars against El Salvador and Nicaragua. The same church bravely fought the destruction of the Latino neighborhood at Chavez Ravine (replaced by Dodger Stadium), and today it continues to advocate for the rights of immigrants pushed across the border by economic brutality.

This vital hub at the historic Los Angeles pueblo is not included on the grand list of California Spanish landmarks. Neither the Sunset coffee table books nor the school library shelf for the fourth graders’ ritual study of the Missions makes mention of La Placita—or Mission Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, as the sign facing Olvera Street read until recently. “Mission” has since been painted over.

I stop for coffee and a black bean-and-queso fresco sandwich at Café de Camacho, on the quiet southwest corner of El Pueblo plaza, and then board the Amtrak Surfliner to the first official Mission of this trip. La Misión de San Juan Capistrano de Sajavit is the halfway point between San Diego de Alcalá and San Gabriel.

By the time the train winds through Fullerton and past Angel Stadium and into Orange County, it is dusk. The Santa Fe depot at San Juan Capistrano is an early stab at Mission Revival, built in 1894—just a half century after the Mission Era—with its red roofing tiles reportedly taken from the ruins of the collapsed church across the road. Restoration of the actual mission would start a year later.

On this summer weekend evening on the coast, I walk the Ortega Highway overpass to the Best Western motel, get the only remaining room, and head back to the depot for dinner at Sarducci’s, the restaurant that has called the station home since 1985. The last trains in both directions make their stops with melodramatic clanging and blasts of the whistle. A big family celebrates a school graduation on the patio tables across from mine. The air smells of garlic and honeysuckle.

The new old-style movie theater and a few other restaurant-bars are doing good business. Woody Allen’s latest movie is showing, about literary Paris. I slip between buildings to the mission itself, its main gates locked for the night.

It looks majestic and haunted from the south approach, the ruins of the great stone church in shadow and streetlight. What remains of the Mission San Juan Capistrano takes up a single long block of about 1,200 feet long and 500 feet wide, just a fraction of the hundreds of square miles that once belonged to this imperial compound—from Aliso Creek to Las Pulgas Canyon, the Pacific shore to Lake Elsinore. The three incarnations of El Camino Real parallel the block on either side: the railroad, the street with its bronze bell-and-staff decorations, and the I-5. From somewhere within the whitewashed adobe walls, I hear music. Bach, strings, the sound of cocktail chatter and silverware clanging. By the time I cross through the mission’s school grounds and retrace my steps from the maze of a darkened parking lot, I see the last of a black-tie crowd board a white charter bus idling outside the eastern wall.

Next: SJC to San Luis Rey to San Diego de Alcalá, by train and trolley.

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