Halcyon: The Utopia That Outlasted Everything

California produced an unusual number of utopian communities in the early twentieth century, groups of people who had decided that the existing social order was inadequate and that something better could be built from scratch on cheap land with enough will. Most of these communities lasted a few years. Some lasted a decade. Almost none of them lasted a century.

Halcyon is the exception.

In eighteen ninety-eight, a group affiliated with the Theosophical movement founded an organization called the Temple of the People in Syracuse, New York. In nineteen oh three, they relocated to California, establishing their community a few miles inland from the Oceano Dunes on land they named Halcyon. The Temple of the People was led by Francia LaDue and Doctor William Dower, and they intended to build a model for a spiritually evolved society rooted in Theosophical principles. They built a triangular temple, designed by architect Theodore Eisen of Los Angeles, the shape chosen to represent the trinities central to great religious teachings. Construction was finished in nineteen twenty-four, when the roof was finally added.

The community is still there. The Temple of the People still holds services. The building constructed over a century ago still stands. Halcyon is now a small residential enclave that tends not to advertise itself, but it is active, and its continuity across more than a hundred and twenty years is genuinely unusual in the history of intentional communities anywhere in the United States.

A few miles from a buried Hollywood set, a few miles from where anarchists and nudists once sheltered in the dunes, a triangular temple from nineteen twenty-three is still in use. The coast keeps its surprises.