Why Forest Lawn Memorial Park matters.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park is an expansive memorial park where Glendale's foothill landscape meets sweeping lawns, hillside architecture and an extraordinary concentration of sculpture, stained glass and religious art.
Set along South Glendale Avenue near the Los Angeles city boundary and just south of Adams Hill, the memorial park spreads across more than 300 acres of rolling terrain rising toward Mount Forest Lawn. Curving roads climb through broad lawns, mature trees, fountains and terraced slopes, replacing dense fields of upright monuments with a landscape organized around architecture and sculpture. Three churches occupy separate points across the grounds, giving the property a distributed architectural character shaped by intimate sanctuaries as well as immense memorial buildings. Elevated sections open long views across Glendale and the Los Angeles basin, allowing changes in topography to govern movement through the property and separate its numerous memorial precincts. The result is a vast hillside composition where lawns, churches, sculpture, terraced architecture and metropolitan views turn a burial ground into one of Southern California's most architecturally ambitious memorial landscapes.
What defines Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park is best known for developing the memorial-park concept that Hubert L. Eaton used to reshape conventional American cemetery design around landscaped grounds, controlled memorialization, architecture and art. The Glendale cemetery began in 1906, and Eaton entered its history several years later before assuming managerial control and becoming the figure most closely associated with its expansion. On New Year's Day 1917, Eaton set out his principles in the Builder's Creed, rejecting the crowded stone monuments of contemporary cemeteries and proposing trees, lawns, fountains, sculpture, flowers and memorial architecture as the physical language of Forest Lawn. His program extended beyond landscape design: Little Church of the Flowers was dedicated on Mother's Day in 1918 after being modeled on the English church at Stoke Poges associated with Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Forest Lawn staged its first Easter Sunrise Service on Mount Forest Lawn in 1924, drawing thousands to a hillside setting centered on the Tower of Legends, an orchestra shell and an illuminated cross; radio broadcasts subsequently carried the services beyond the property. The organization added a mortuary within the cemetery grounds in 1933, creating an integrated operation that joined cemetery, funeral, church and floral functions on one property. Eaton's program expanded across succeeding decades into an institutional model in which landscape, ritual, architecture and public cultural programming occupied the same memorial setting.
Art collecting developed as an equally consequential strand, beginning in 1915 when Eaton acquired Edith Barretto Parsons's bronze Duck Baby after seeing statuary at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Forest Lawn subsequently commissioned sculpture and pictorial glass across the property, and by the 1940s the Great Mausoleum contained a Hall of American Sculpture. Eaton conceived a stained-glass version of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper during a 1924 trip to Italy and commissioned Rosa Moretti to execute the work; the 30-by-15-foot composition required nearly seven years, repeated kiln firings and extensive structural planning before installation in the Great Mausoleum. Another acquisition began when Eaton and colleagues located Jan Styka's enormous The Crucifixion at the Chicago Civic Opera company in 1943, decades after the Polish artist had brought the 195-by-45-foot painting to the United States for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition but failed to exhibit it there. Forest Lawn purchased the painting after World War II and constructed the Hall of the Crucifixion specifically for it, opening the building on Good Friday in 1951. American artist Robert Clark completed the 70-by-51-foot The Resurrection in 1965 after winning a competition for a companion work, extending the hall into a two-painting presentation. Forest Lawn Museum had opened beside the hall in 1952, giving the art program a dedicated institution whose holdings span bronze and marble sculpture, painting and stained glass. The collection transformed Eaton's early purchase of a small bronze into a sustained cultural program encompassing commissioned glass, grand religious painting, sculpture and museum exhibitions.
How Forest Lawn Memorial Park fits.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park works as the anchor for a Glendale outing connecting the city's formative development, surviving Victorian domestic architecture and Southern California's preservation of electric-sign art.
Begin at Brand Library & Art Center, the former Miradero estate of Leslie Coombs Brand, whose investments in transportation, utilities and real estate helped shape early twentieth-century Glendale. Brand commissioned his brother-in-law Nathaniel Dryden to design the residence after seeing the East India Pavilion at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; completed in 1904, Miradero received towers, minarets and scalloped arches derived from that Indo-Islamic source. Brand worked with Henry Huntington and Edgar Goode to bring electric rail service between Glendale and Los Angeles, later developed an airstrip on his estate and staged a 1921 aviation luncheon requiring attendees to arrive by airplane. His 1925 bequest eventually transferred the house and grounds to Glendale, and the mansion opened as a public arts library in 1956. Continue to Doctors House Museum, a Queen Anne-Eastlake residence built 1888 and originally located on East Wilson Avenue. Four physicians owned the house in succession, supplying the name retained after its preservation, and silent-screen actor and filmmaker Nell Shipman later lived there with her family during the early twentieth century. Demolition threatened the structure in 1979, prompting community activists to organize the Glendale Historical Society; the house was moved to Brand Park and restored through thousands of volunteer hours before its 1982 dedication to the city. Glendale subsequently designated the building as Historic Resource No. 6, preserving a rare domestic survivor from the community's nineteenth-century development. Conclude at Museum of Neon Art, founded in Downtown in 1981 by artists Lili Lakich and Richard Jenkins to preserve historic electric signs and present neon as a contemporary artistic medium. The institution moved through several Los Angeles locations, including Universal CityWalk, Grand Hope Park and the Historic Core, before securing its permanent Glendale home at the southern end of the city's Arts and Entertainment Corridor. Its preservation work has included the LUMENS project with the City of Los Angeles and the long-running Neon Cruise, joining historic-sign conservation with exhibitions devoted to electric and kinetic art. An on-site classroom extends that mission into the physical craft of bending, fabricating and processing neon tubing. The progression moves from Brand's role in Glendale's early urban expansion through the rescue of a nineteenth-century residence and culminates in Lakich and Jenkins's preservation of Southern California's electric-sign heritage, tracing three distinct forms of cultural stewardship across the city.
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