Plans Take Shape for Armenian Cathedral Project

With his dreams of a hilltop cathedral in Hollywood dashed years earlier, the ranking Western prelate in the Armenian Church of North America is happily settling for Burbank.

Archbishop Vatche Hovsepian said his church will soon apply for city permits to redesign the headquarters of its Western diocese close to the Golden State Freeway to include a cathedral topped by a 70-foot-tall tower and dome.

“People will see something beautiful from the freeway,” Hovsepian said in his office at the Western diocese offices on Glenoaks Boulevard across the street from Woodbury University.

Although not as elaborate as the projected Roman Catholic cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, the Armenian cathedral complex may also serve as a cultural and educational center for many of the estimated 250,000 Armenian Americans in Los Angeles County, Hovsepian said.

Depending on how the permit process goes, construction is expected to be completed in 1998 or 1999, he said.

The 600-seat cathedral, a large social hall and conference rooms will be built mostly within the existing walls of a 34,000-square-foot building that the church bought for $2.5 million from a medical supplies company, said architect Vartan Jangozian of Glendale.

No debt remains on the property, the archbishop said. He added that billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, owner of MGM Studios and the MGM Grand hotel-casino in Las Vegas, gave $500,000 to the project through his Lincy Foundation, which also supports the diocese’s summer camp.

The archbishop admits to lingering frustration over his dreams, essentially abandoned in the early 1990s, to build a cathedral on land the church owns in the Cahuenga Pass.

“We were planning to have a magnificent cathedral on about five acres of land on Barham Boulevard,” he said. “We had an impasse with the neighbors because of the zoning.”

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When the 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged the diocese’s offices at St. John Armenian Church in Hollywood, Hovsepian and diocesan administrators moved temporarily into four classrooms at St. Gregory Armenian Church in Pasadena.

The Burbank property was purchased, and after three years and three months of cramped existence at the Pasadena parish church, the diocese finally relocated in May.

Hovsepian, 67, has headed the diocese--made up of 25 congregations in six Western states--since 1971. Among the diocese’s congregations are churches in Van Nuys, Inglewood, Costa Mesa, La Verne and San Diego.

(Several other Armenian churches--identical in theology and practices--are affiliated with a branch of the church that formed this century because of the Soviet domination of Armenia and other member republics for many decades. Reconciliation talks are continuing between that branch, whose patriarch resides in Lebanon, and the historic church based in Armenia.)

Hovsepian has traveled frequently to the Republic of Armenia as chairman of a committee rewriting the Armenian Apostolic Church’s constitution now that the historic church is no longer subject to Communist domination after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Recently reelected to a seven-year term as archbishop, Hovsepian said he is looking forward to hosting at his new facility an upcoming monthly meeting of the Council of Religious Leaders, a group of about 15 Christian and Jewish leaders in Los Angeles that includes Catholic Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Episcopal Bishop Frederick Borsch and United Methodist Bishop Roy Sano, among others.