The hook
A cathedral built entirely of glass, ten thousand panes of it, rises out of a Garden Grove parking lot, once the home of a televangelist and now the seat of a Catholic diocese.
01Why it's worth it
Robert Schuller started preaching in 1955 from the snack bar of a drive-in theater, telling people to come as they were and stay in their cars, and his ministry grew until he hired the architect Philip Johnson to build him a church open to "the sky and the surrounding world." What Johnson delivered, finished in 1980, was astonishing: a vast star-shaped hall walled and roofed entirely in glass, ten thousand rectangular panes glued to a white steel web, engineered to flex through a magnitude-8 earthquake, briefly the largest glass building on Earth. It was the stage for Schuller's Hour of Power broadcasts until the ministry went bankrupt; the Catholic Diocese of Orange bought it, softened the blinding interior light with louvers, and reopened it in 2019 as Christ Cathedral. It's a genuinely strange and impressive piece of modern architecture, still doing what it was built to do.
02How to experience it
It's in Garden Grove, about seven hours from the Bay. It's an active cathedral, open to visitors outside of services; go in daytime to see the light pour through the glass. The grounds hold other Schuller-era oddities worth a look. It's free to visit.