Calvary Cemetery: The Unauthorized Guide
Mark Masek
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Copyright 2012 Mark Masek
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The Main Mausoleum at Calvary Cemetery was completed in 1936, and features a large number of beautiful stained glass windows, hand-painted ceilings and artistic detail.
The All Souls Chapel at Calvary Cemetery was built in 1902 and is a replica of a rural church in Buckinghamshire, England.
Calvary Cemetery
4201 Whittier Blvd.
Los Angeles, Calif. 90023
History: The original Calvary Cemetery was one of the first burial grounds to open in Los Angeles. The plot for the Roman Catholic cemetery was laid out in early 1844, six years before Los Angeles was incorporated as a city. The cemetery was originally located northwest of the city, near the current site of Dodger Stadium. The road leading from the city to the cemetery – the “last mile” for the dearly departed – was originally called Calle de Eternidad, or Eternity Street. The name was later changed to Buena Vista Street, and is now known as North Broadway.
The small cemetery grounds were blessed by a parish priest in November 1844, but the site was not formally consecrated until 1866, with Bishop Thaddeus Amat doing the honors. In the meantime, there was a minor scandal at the cemetery in 1856 when someone forced open the lock on the main cemetery gate, and illegally buried a body that was not officially eligible for burial in a Catholic cemetery – perhaps the only recorded case of “reverse grave-robbing.”
The small cemetery quickly filled, and was officially closed to new burials in 1896, when the new Calvary Cemetery was opened on a 137-acre site on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles. But the old cemetery site remained, neglected and crumbling. The fence surrounding the property was falling, monuments were broken and tall weeds covered the grounds. In 1925, the city of Los Angeles passed an ordinance requiring that all bodies be removed from the old Calvary Cemetery and re-interred in the new cemetery by Jan. 1, 1928. But it wasn’t until the early 1930s when the last body was finally removed and relocated.
Cathedral High School, the first all-boys Catholic high school in Los Angeles, opened on the site of the old cemetery in 1925. In honor of the location’s previous occupants, the high school teams are known as the “Phantoms.” The Pasadena Freeway (110), which opened in 1940, runs through part of the old cemetery grounds.
The new Calvary Cemetery is located at 4201 Whittier Blvd. in East Los Angeles, bounded by Third Street on the north, Eastern Avenue on the east, and Downey Road on the west. At the far north end of the cemetery is a 12-foot-high concrete obelisk, a memorial to the Old Calvary Cemetery.
As a Catholic cemetery, Calvary features a display of colorful, hand-painted, glass-enclosed Stations of the Cross scattered around the property. (Public recitations of the Stations are made every Sunday in Lent and during the month of November.) Calvary also formerly contained the mortal remains of many high-ranking church and diocese officials, including cardinals, archbishops and bishops – although most of the remains were relocated to the catacombs beneath the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles when it opened in 2002. Hundreds of priests and nuns are buried around the All Souls Chapel in the middle of the cemetery. This ornate Gothic chapel, built in 1902, is a replica of a rural church in Buckinghamshire, England.
For a time, Calvary Cemetery was also the temporary home of the remains of the patron saint of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, St. Vibiana. In 1853, Vibiana’s remains were unearthed in Rome, along with a marble slab inscribed, “To the soul of the innocent and pure Vibiana.” The church determined that her remains were 1,500 years old, and that she had died a violent death for her faith, so Vibiana was declared a virgin-martyr and saint.