Hopeville Fire Dept., Tony Lembo, Holy Land U.S.A.

HOLY LAND WAS OURS,
AND WE WERE PART OF HOLY LAND

     Some of my most treasured childhood memories are of family visits to Holy Land U.S.A., a 17-acre park in the middle of Waterbury on a hill overlooking the Naugatuck River Valley. It was a miniature Jerusalem with dioramas and statues and plaques commemorating important events from the Bible.
      Many years later, while I was still trying to make sense of Stephen C. Foley’s betrayal and the Catholic Church’s heartlessness, I returned to Holy Land and found it, like the church my mother worshipped, in ruins (images at right).
   Here are two excerpts, one describing my experience as a child, the other thirty years later.

1960s

     I’d dash off, following the paved walkways that wound this way and that across and up the hillside, stopping to examine the Garden of Eden, the Sphinx and pyramids of Egypt, the little town of Bethlehem and the stable where Jesus was born, the miniature Jerusalem where some of the buildings were just big enough for me to crawl into, the grotto with little painted figures sitting at the Last Supper just like in the painting, and the long, dark tunnel of the Catacombs where Christians were whipped with chains and eaten by lions. It just went on and on, and each time we went I discovered something new.

     Each exhibit had hand-painted plaques with quotes from the Bible and a title to explain what the story was about. “Jesus is Stripped of His Garment.” “Peter and the Shroud.” “There Came Three Wise Men From the East.” “Jesus Falls a Second Time.”

     Near the top was Golgotha, with three tall crosses and a full-scale plaster Jesus nailed to the tallest one in the middle. People were always kneeling and praying and fiddling with their rosaries. My mother always paid a visit to Golgotha.

     On the peak of the mountain stood the biggest cross of all, a 50-foot-tall metal monolith, illuminated at night, every night, all year long. People said that, on a clear crisp winter night, it was visible forty miles away.

     Many times over the years I’d heard the story of how John Greco, a local lawyer who was the son of a cobbler, had put up the money and some other people, who called themselves the Catholic Campaigners for Christ, had donated cement and other materials to build Holy Land. Greco and his friends had designed and built everything with their bare hands, starting in 1956. They were still adding exhibits in the 1960s, when I was a kid.

     My mother loved going, and that gave me a sense of ownership. Holy Land was ours, and we were part of Holy Land. It was one of the wonders of the world: something to make you proud to be Catholic; something to make you feel good about living in Waterbury, home of Holy Land, U.S.A., and the Scovill brassworks, defender of freedom.

2002

     The neighborhood around Holy Land looked shabbier than I remembered. People loitered in front of bodegas drinking out of paper bags. Dead weeds poked through the asphalt. Household garbage had been dumped along the edge by the trees. The dirty, tan stucco on the entrance archway, designed to evoke a castle wall, was cracked and had fallen off in places, exposing its cinderblock skeleton. Gangs had spray-painted tags all over it. A locked, rusting, chainlink fence, sagging in the middle, kept out cars but we were able to walk around it.

     We climbed the paved walkway up the mountain past one smashed exhibit after another, all overgrown with winter-bare vegetation. Made of stucco or concrete and chicken wire, many of the buildings had been knocked over, or smashed. It looked exactly like a Meditteranean village that had been destroyed by an earthquake.

     Lying smashed on the ground under some dead branches was a concrete tablet, broken in half, that read, “Every Day is Christmas.” The colorfully painted clay figures in the Last Supper diorama all had their heads broken off. There were downed crosses laying on the ground here and there, and the figure of Jesus that had been on the big cross at the Golgotha exhibit was gone.

     It was hard to know whether to cry or curse. It felt like another in a string of betrayals and losses, another chunk of my childhood down the drain. All the blood money those wives and mothers poured into those collection baskets every Sunday so priests like Foley didn’t have to work for a living and had time to run around playing grab-ass with a bunch of boys.

     At the top of the mountain, the massive lighted cross was still there, streaked by years of soot and bird shit: a false beacon of faith in a Biblical wasteland.