Holy City, California

01The Palm Reader Who Built a Town

William Edward Riker was born in 1873 and made his early living as a traveling "mind reader" and palm reader on the West Coast. According to his Wikipedia biography, he fled to Canada to avoid bigamy charges in San Francisco before returning to California and announcing that he had been chosen to lead humanity through the apocalypse. The doctrine he assembled, which he called The Perfect Christian Divine Way, blended Christian millennialism with strict racial segregation, celibacy, temperance, and a belief that only white men were fit to govern.

In 1919 Riker used the fortunes of his followers to purchase 142 acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The property straddled the main wagon road between the Santa Clara Valley and the coast, which made it something other utopian experiments were not: commercially viable. The community incorporated in 1926 and acquired a post office in 1927, effectively inheriting the mail route of the older settlement of Patchen nearby.

02A Roadside Attraction Disguised as a Religion

Holy City was never a large congregation. The religious community itself probably never exceeded thirty members at one time, yet Riker turned the highway frontage into a carnival of commerce. Motorists stopping for gasoline encountered a restaurant, a service station, an observatory, a barbershop, a shoe repair, a soda stand, and a small zoo. Riker's signs, painted in blunt block letters, were the main draw. Some promised religious enlightenment. Others, according to contemporary accounts preserved by the Santa Cruz Public Libraries and Santa Cruz Waves, bluntly advertised the community's racist doctrine to passing drivers.

In 1924 Holy City launched its own radio station, KFQU, which went on air on July 7 of that year. By 1931 the Federal Radio Commission found KFQU broadcasting on an unauthorized frequency, and the station's license renewal was denied in January 1932 for what regulators called "irregularities." The station, the restaurant, the zoo, and the signs all fed the same machinery: tourist dollars flowing back to Riker, who held the deeds.

03What Happened to Holy City?

Two forces dismantled the settlement. The first was the state of California. When a modern divided highway, eventually designated State Route 17, was routed through the mountains beginning around 1940, it bypassed Old Santa Cruz Highway and the Holy City frontage. Traffic collapsed almost overnight. By 1938 a local census had already counted only 75 men and four women at the site, and the new highway finished the job.

The second force was Riker himself. In 1942 the FBI arrested him on sedition charges after agents obtained letters he had written expressing support for Adolf Hitler and attacking Jewish, British, Filipino, and Chinese people. He was defended by a young Melvin Belli, later one of the most famous trial lawyers in the country, whose strategy was to argue that his client was simply a harmless "crackpot." A jury acquitted Riker, who promptly sued Belli for defamation over the "crackpot" characterization and lost. Civil litigation, tax troubles, and Riker's own serial marriages in violation of his celibacy doctrine eroded what remained of his authority. He lost control of the property in 1960 and, at age 93, converted to Catholicism in 1966. He died in 1969 at Agnews State Hospital in Santa Clara.

Holy City disincorporated in 1959. Within months, a series of mysterious fires destroyed most of the remaining structures. The causes were never officially determined.

04Can You Visit Holy City Today?

Yes, but there is very little to see. Old Santa Cruz Highway is a public paved road, and drivers heading south from Los Gatos can pass the former townsite in a few minutes. A low-slung commercial building survives and now houses the Holy City Art Glass studio, which operates as a working glassblower's shop. One other small structure remains nearby. The parcel itself was sold in 2016 for a reported $6 million to Robert and Trish Duggan, prominent members of the Church of Scientology, and public access to the interior of the land is limited. Visitors should stay on the roadway and respect private property signage.

The site is also part of the Lexington Hills census-designated place, and the surrounding Santa Cruz Mountains offer redwood hiking in nearby Lexington Reservoir County Park and the Forest of Nisene Marks, which can make a short Holy City detour a reasonable stop on a longer day trip.

05What Remains of Holy City Today

Two buildings. A stretch of cracked asphalt along Old Santa Cruz Highway. A ZIP code, 95026, that still technically exists. The signs are long gone, the zoo is gone, the radio tower is gone, and the congregation that once preached a segregated apocalypse from this patch of redwood hillside has been reduced to a footnote in Santa Clara County history. For a settlement whose founder insisted he would lead the world into a new age, the remaining footprint of Holy City is strikingly small, and almost entirely commercial rather than religious. The art glass studio, visible from the road, is the only active business left.