The Glass Church Is Coming Back to Rancho Palos Verdes, Just Not Where You Remember It

If you drove Palos Verdes Drive South this July and looked toward the old Wayfarers Chapel bluff above Abalone Cove, you saw fencing, cracked walkways, and the space where a National Historic Landmark used to stand. What you did not see is that the chapel is being planned back into the city about a mile inland and west, on a piece of ground most residents pass on Hawthorne Boulevard without a second look.

The short version most coverage has settled for is "Wayfarers is moving to Battery Barnes." The longer version, the one worth knowing if you live here, is that the project on the table is not a like-for-like reconstruction. It is a small civic campus built around a WWII bunker, and it only happens if a federal land transfer clears Congress and roughly $20 to $30 million gets raised. Everything else follows from that.

A mile west, and one street off Hawthorne

The prospective new site is a roughly four-acre former U.S. Coast Guard parcel called Battery Barnes, sitting adjacent to Ken Dyda Civic Center at 30940 Hawthorne Boulevard. In written testimony to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in January 2026, Rep. Ted Lieu described it as an "approximately 4-acre Coast Guard property located 1 mile west on a former WWII coastal defense site at the Ken Dyda Civic Center."

Two details from that testimony matter for anyone trying to picture the finished thing. The property is home to a 5,000-square-foot subterranean bunker and is currently in the divestiture process. And the envisioned campus is not just a chapel. It also includes public restrooms, a museum, café, interpretive visitor center, public trails and open space, public parking, and educational native plant gardens.

What is actually on that parcel right now

If you park at the Civic Center and walk the edge of the property, this is what you are looking at:

• A 4.6-acre swath the Wayfarers organization has been calling Battery-Barnes, described on the chapel's own site as a former World War II coastal defense installation and part of the region's historic network of bunkers that safeguarded the Los Angeles coastline.
• A single 5,000-square-foot bunker structure underground, otherwise unbuilt land.
• Habitat immediately around it. The site is surrounded by a Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy nature preserve that is home to the endangered Palos Verdes Blue Butterfly.
• A sightline down toward the Point Vicente Lighthouse, the same active navigational landmark visible from the interpretive center trail most residents already know.

The reason the chapel's board and the city both landed on this parcel is not proximity to City Hall. It is the sightline. Administrative director Robert Carr told LAist last year that the coastal views and the hilltop location match the original location "in an uncanny way."

The bill that has to pass first

Nothing about this campus is guaranteed. Battery Barnes is still federal land, and getting a chapel built on it requires an act of Congress in the literal sense. Rep. Ted Lieu plans to introduce legislation that would transfer federal land from the U.S. Coast Guard to the city, clearing the way to rebuild the iconic glass chapel.

Mayor Paul Seo has been careful about the framing. In his statement to Patch in January 2026, Seo said "while no commitments or agreements are in place, securing a land transfer is a critical step toward making this vision a reality." Carr said the same thing more plainly:

"It's certainly not a done deal and we don't want to get out ahead of that."

If you live near Ken Dyda and you have been wondering why nothing appears to be happening on the parcel, that is the answer. The land does not belong to anyone who can break ground on it yet.

The numbers that separate a chapel-only rebuild from the campus

Fundraising is the second gate, and the way the two figures work together is worth pausing on. Rebuilding the chapel alone and rebuilding the campus the renderings show are two different projects at two different price points.

Two things fall out of that table.

First, the difference between land movement rates before and during the crisis is not incremental. It is nearly two orders of magnitude. City officials say the land where the chapel is located has been moving around 7 inches a week for the past few months. Compare that to the period of October 2021 to October 2022, when the land moved at a rate of around 0.08 inches a week. That is why nobody is trying to anchor the original structure in place. It is why the decision to deconstruct Wayfarers Chapel was made only after other means were exhausted, including anchoring the chapel to the ground with concrete columns, and after land movement had "torqued" the super structure held together by eight redwood arches and metal framing.

Second, the $10 million floor gets a chapel back. The additional roughly $20 million gets the museum, café, trails, and gardens that would make the site a place residents visit on a Saturday rather than a wedding venue neighbors drive past. Those are effectively two different projects sharing an address.

What is already in storage, and what is not

The chapel itself is not lost. It is inventoried and boxed. The wooden beams, glass fixtures and steel mullions were moved to a secure location in Rancho Palos Verdes to prevent further damage while officials contemplate the chapel's future. As each element is carefully removed, it was cataloged before being taken to storage. The painstaking process will allow the Wayfarers Chapel to be reassembled to much of its former glory.

The pieces that cannot be replaced are the ones the reader should picture when they hear the word "reassemble." "So many of the chapel's original materials that were part of the Lloyd Wright design cannot be replicated today: the old growth redwood glulam, the blue roof tiles, the elegant network of steel that holds the windows together."

That is why the disassembly took a firm, a national agency, and most of a year. Architectural Resources Group led the work with input from the National Park Service, given the landmark designation. Before deconstruction began, ARG built a 3D model of Wayfarers Chapel that will serve as a record and reference for the existing conditions. The panes of glass already broken were the only pieces sacrificed; samples were kept so replacements can be fabricated.

The redwoods, the ones that gave the chapel the interior forest that Lloyd Wright designed for, are staying on the old site. They were never movable.

Why the sightline into the preserve is doing more work than it looks

The reason the Battery Barnes proposal has traction, and the reason the city has been willing to spend political capital on the land transfer, is that the parcel does something the old site cannot: it puts the chapel back in a forested setting without depending on ground that is still moving.

Carr described the surroundings this way. He said the Battery Barnes site is one of the last unbuilt areas on the peninsula that is "surrounded literally on all sides by nature preserve land, you see hardly any buildings at all."

That framing matters because it links two things residents have historically thought about separately: the chapel as a wedding destination, and the PVPLC preserves as a hiking network. The proposed campus threads them. Wayfarers has spoken with the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District about potentially using the new site for education purposes, including museum displays for school groups to spend a few hours learning about the local history and going for a walk on the nature preserve land to learn about nature.

If you have children in the district, that is worth watching. It is the first time in the chapel's 75-year history that the site has been discussed as an everyday educational stop rather than a Sunday and Saturday destination.

What a neighbor walking past this summer is actually seeing

Put the pieces together and here is the honest read for the second half of 2026.

The parcel next to Ken Dyda will look unchanged for a while. Federal land transfers do not move quickly, and the chapel's board has publicly said no commitments are in place. Nothing visible will happen on the ground until Lieu's bill clears the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the Coast Guard completes divestiture, and the Wayfarers Chapel Fund for the Future clears at least the $10 million chapel-only threshold.

The parts that already exist, the disassembled chapel components in local storage, the 3D archival model, the Architectural Resources Group construction record, are the reason this is a "when" question rather than an "if" one. Efforts are underway to raise funding to support the preservation of Wayfarers Chapel and to re-erect it on a new site. The 75th-anniversary marker in May 2026 came and went with the chapel in storage. The next milestone is legislative.

For residents, the practical implication is smaller than the coverage suggests. There is no timeline yet for a new wedding venue, no groundbreaking date to circle, and no rush of construction traffic on Hawthorne. What there is, is a plan specific enough that if you drive past the Civic Center this summer, you can point at the empty parcel and describe exactly what the city and the chapel's board are trying to put there. That is more than most residents could have said a year ago.

If you own on this side of the peninsula and want to understand how civic projects like this one shape the neighborhoods around them over the long term, or you are thinking about the next chapter of your own move here or away from here, Randazzo Real Estate lives in these conversations every week. Reach out when the timing is right, and request your free home valuation when you are ready to see where your home fits in the current market.