Angelus Temple

Aimee Semple McPherson arrived in Los Angeles in 1918, an itinerant tent revivalist already known nationally for faith healing services that drew crowds by the thousands, and within five years her followers had raised enough money to build her a permanent home. Angelus Temple opened on New Year's Day 1923 in Echo Park, its auditorium seating fifty three hundred people beneath a poured concrete dome wider than any built in North America to that date, a scale meant to hold a congregation that had already outgrown every tent and hall available to it.

McPherson used the building as more than a sanctuary. In 1924 she put a radio station, KFSG, on the air from its towers, among the first religious broadcasters in the country. Three years later she organized the congregation into the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a name drawn from her account of a vision she read as picturing Christ as savior, healer, baptizer and coming king, and the denomination she founded there has since grown to millions of members worldwide.

The temple's most famous episode had nothing to do with doctrine. On May 18, 1926, McPherson went swimming at a Los Angeles beach and did not come back, presumed drowned until she reappeared thirty six days later at the Mexican border, telling reporters she had been kidnapped. Skeptics suspected a secret rendezvous with a former radio engineer instead, and a grand jury spent months hearing testimony on whether she had staged the episode, before prosecutors dropped every charge in December 1926 for lack of evidence.

McPherson led services at Angelus Temple until her death in 1944, and the congregation has occupied the same domed sanctuary since, now a National Historic Landmark whose grounds also house a social ministry serving Echo Park directly.

Angelus Temple's founding story ends with McPherson's disappearance and return; a different institution she built at the same address ran through the years after, largely apart from the pulpit drama. The Angelus Temple commissary opened in August 1928, more than a year before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, but the crash transformed a modest relief operation into one of Los Angeles's largest sources of aid for the poor, open around the clock, seven days a week, for the length of the crisis.

The commissary distributed food, clothing, shelter, medical assistance and cash to anyone who came asking, without a means test and without regard to race or religion, a policy the temple maintained even as many contemporary relief agencies drew lines around who qualified for help. McPherson's biographer Daniel Mark Epstein later described it as one of the region's most effective and inclusive welfare institutions, crediting it with feeding lunch to children whose schools could not and handing out bread and quilts to families turned away elsewhere. Over the course of the Depression the commissary fed and clothed more than a million people, a figure the Foursquare denomination's own history places above one and a half million.

The journalist Carey McWilliams, no friend to McPherson's theology, credited the temple with something plainer: it made migrants feel at home in a city that had not built anything else to receive them. The commissary outlived the scandal that had followed McPherson through the same decade, running as a fixture of Echo Park's daily life well after the courtroom questions about her disappearance had been dropped, a second legacy built on giving food away rather than drawing crowds to hear about it.