The Holy City turnoff stirs childhood memory

By Daryl Glen

The Santa Cruz Mountains have held an almost mystical attraction for me since I was a little boy. I remember the imposing feline edifices on Highway 17, the old roadhouse next door, The Cats, the eclectic names of the many little towns: Redwood Estates, Aldecroft Heights, Chimiquita Park. One town, Holy City, struck me as particularly enticing, if not incongruous. I became fixated on the place in my mind, envisioning a glistening Nirvana, and I remember begging my father to stop there on the way to the beach. One Saturday afternoon he finally relented, to my eternal disappointment.

No heavenly palaces and white-robed angels here, even in the late 1960s--just a seedy roadside bar with more than the average number of Harley-Davidsons parked in front, and a name harkening to a bygone era. I quickly buried the place in the lower recesses of my memory, much as the Santa Cruz Mountains claim neglected houses, only unearthing it recently when a friend and I spent a year of weekends searching for a home for him in the mountains, and we passed the Holy City turnoff.

"You don't know Holy City?" he said, surprised. "It was wonderful. A man named Father Ryker built it in the 1930s. It was quite a booming place, famous for having the most powerful radio station in the area, KFQU, and if those call letters don't represent his attitude toward his followers. ... He used to give sermons every Sunday night on topics like 'Religion, the Ductless Glands and You.' "

My friend eventually found his dream house. I finally visited him, and what should I find on his bookshelf but a history of Holy City, allowing me to complete a jigsaw puzzle I had started three decades ago.

Holy City was the dream child of a man named William E. Ryker, a traveling palm reader. The self-proclaimed "comforter" of a spiritual movement of his own creation, the Perfect Christian Divine Way, bought 75 acres in the mountains in 1918 for about $6,000, on which to establish a "perfect Utopia" with 30 followers. The Perfect Christian Divine Way emphasized white supremacy, total segregation of the races, abstinence from alcohol, separation of the sexes, and being "born again."

"Father" Ryker urged his followers, who eventually numbered in the hundreds, to give up all their worldly concerns--and all of their money to him. Holy City soon became a popular tourist stop on the Old Santa Cruz Highway, complete with plastic Santa Claus figurines. Holy City was by then a $100,000-a-year tourist business; original postcards from the place can still fetch as much as $100. Part of Holy City's success was perhaps due to its having one of the only gas stations in the area, although it also housed a restaurant, comfort station and observatory, where for 10 cents visitors could see the moon through a telescope. Long ago, billboards advertised "Holy City answers all questions and solves all problems" and "See us if you are contemplating marriage, suicide or crime."

Although Holy City was advertised as a religious place, in fact no church was ever built, and the radio station, the second one licensed in California, lasted only two years, after which its license was revoked for "irregularities."

During World War II "Father" Ryker made the news when he was investigated by the FBI after it was found he was writing letters of support to Adolf Hitler. A young Melvin Belli represented him in court, pleading for leniency because he was, in his opinion, less a subversive and more "the screwiest of the screwballs."

At about the same time, Highway 17 opened and there was a drop in traffic along the Old Santa Cruz Highway. The city fell into decline, a series of fires of dubious origin destroyed many of the buildings, and in 1959 Ryker sold Holy City to a private party. He died in 1969 at Agnews State Hospital.

My friend likes to tell the story of how he used to visit the by-then-defunct Holy City in the early 1960s in search of artifacts, and how he once attended a party in San Francisco where a baroque plaster of Paris "sculpture" from the town had been turned into an end table, which, appropriately enough, crumbled to dust when another party guest sat on it.

Only one building remains from what was once "the perfect Utopia," a store that sells colored glass.

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Daryl Glen is Los Gatos resident.

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