Dateline>City of Angels

Today’s pop quiz is dedicated to Mission San Gabriel, which celebrates its 237th annual fiesta tomorrow through Sunday. Founded Sept. 8, 1771, it was fourth in California’s chain of 21 missions, and among the most prosperous. It can also be called L.A.’s Mother Church, since the pobladores set out from here to found the City of Angels. But the current site is not the mission’s first location.

The Question: Where was the original site of the mission? (Follow the “Read More” jump for the answer.)

The Answer: Technically, the mission “moved” twice before landing in its present location. Originally, it was to be founded in honor of San Miguel along the Santa Ana River. When the padres arrived at the site, however, they decided to press on.

Reaching a spot at the Rio Hondo rivulet, near the present-day intersection of San Gabriel Blvd. and Lincoln Ave. in Montebello, they instead dedicated the mission to El Santo Archangel Gabriel de los Temblores (The Holy Archangel Gabriel of the Earthquakes). Around 1775, the river’s persistent flooding forced the mission’s relocation five miles north, where it stands today.

Architectural Shakeups…

For the historical minded, the mission of the Archangel of the Earthquakes offers an ideal reflection on the influence of seismic activity on our region’s human and architectural history. Few people realize the mission’s cattle brand was an iron “Ts” which stood for “temblores,” the Spanish word for earthquakes.

Most significant is the church, designed by Fr. Antonio Cruzado and begun in 1791. Patterned after the cathedral of his native Cordova and completed in 1805, the unique building features a series of Moorish buttresses. Functional as much as stylish, they were designed to help bolster the four-foot-thick stone and mortar walls against the area’s frequent tremors.

Fr. Cruzado’s design was put to a major test in 1812, when a swarm of large quakes rattled missions throughout California. While Mission San Gabriel’s church survived, its original bell tower toppled, leaving two nasty scars and a “floating” door still visible today at the northeast facade.

Reconstructing the Original…

No one knows exactly how the first campanile appeared, but in 1916 architectural historian Rexford Newcomb drafted a theoretical sketch based on his extensive study of the missions. Pictured left, it shows a three-bell campanile similar to those found at Missions Santa Inez and La Purisima. It was replaced by the now-famous six-bell campanile at the opposite end of the church.

The Archangel Gabriel must have been smiling on his namesake mission in 1812, because it fared much better than several others that suffered so much damage they had to be rebuilt. The biggest disaster, however, was at Mission San Juan Capistrano, which boasted a “Great Stone Church.” The largest in the chain, it featured six domes and a towering 120-foot belfry at the main entrance that collapsed backward into the nave, killing some 40 neophytes and leaving nothing but ruins.

Lasting Impressions…

Perhaps chastened by the experience at Capistrano, mission padres never again attempted such grandiose building projects. Of course, today you can see the influence of the squat, thick-walled, buttressed forms that they came to prefer in California’s romanticized Mission Revival architecture of the early 1900s.