My dearly departed father resides in one of the more historic cemeteries in Los Angeles, Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Alongside the squirrels, transient coyotes, and fragrant magnolia trees, my dad can call the gloved thriller himself, Michael Jackson, alongside other celebrity luminaries like Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Sammy Davis Jr., Walt Disney, and Sam Cooke, all neighbors. The memorial park is beautiful, all rotund green hills, thoughtfully laid out with private shaded nooks to discover, relaxing fountains to sit by, lovely statuary to admire (1,500 of them), all mostly without upright grave markers to hinder the park-like atmosphere. It also hides an awesome secret most Angelenos don’t know about, let alone visit.
Forest Lawn’s founder, Dr. Hubert Eaton (who signed off with Masonic pride as “The Builder”), not only imagined his memorial park to be a place of peaceful introspection in times of death, but also aimed to enliven the grounds with the same architecture, art, and spirit of the Old World to invite the living to visit. For example, there’s an exact replica of Michelangelo’s unashamedly nude David looming over a corner courtyard to take in, while an exhibition dedicated to “The Art of the Motorcycle” is currently housed inside the main Forest Lawn Museum. In its entirety, Forest Lawn is an inviting place to stroll through even without deceased kin or friends to visit – sort of the quiet cultural yin to cross town rival, Hollywood Forever’s raucous movie-on-the-cemetery-lawn-and-concerts-in-the-park yang.
And up on the highest hill of Forest Lawn Memorial Park is housed one of the biggest guarded, yet open to the public, secrets in Los Angeles.
Behind the doors of the Hall of The Crucifixion-Resurrection is the largest permanently mounted religious painting in the world. Painted by Polish artist, Jan Styka, the 195 feet long and 45 feet tall The Crucifixion is kept behind closed doors and hidden under protective curtains inside a cavernous auditorium built specifically to showcase the enormous panoramic capturing humanity wronging our hippy-haired savior, a religious still life Cinerama Dome (which, by the way, for comparison is only 32 feet by 86 feet in size).
Because there’s no photography allowed inside the Hall of The Crucifixion-Resurrection, I was only able to leave with this $2.50 postcard to illustrate the width of the painting. The dinosaur is not there for scale.
Visitors are invited – for free – to sit through a somewhat overly melodramatic presentation before unveiling a painting so wide, you’ll notice fellow attendees’ heads motioning side-to-side as if responding, “No…heavens no!” The aged and somewhat musty auditorium setting further adds to an Overlook Hotel, “it’s always been there” vibe, but it’s hard not to recommend everyone experience the grandiose piece of artwork resurrected for display six days a week – regardless of faith (or lack thereof ) – at least once.