Portal of the Folded Wings, Shrine to Aviation. |
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| Details | |
|---|---|
| Year established | 1923 |
| Country | United States |
| Location | North Hollywood, California |
| Size | 63 acres (25 ha) |
Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery is located at 10621 Victory Boulevard in North Hollywood, California.
The cemetery has a special section called the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation that is the final resting place for a number of aviation pioneers — barnstormers, daredevils and sundry architects of aviation. There is a memorial to Amelia Earhart and others, honoring their accomplishments.
Among those interred here are some celebrities from the entertainment industry.
The shrine, with a colorful tile dome and female figures stretching their arms to the heavens, originally was built as an impressive entrance to Valhalla Memorial Park cemetery. It was named for the palace of Odin, the Norse god of slain heroes.
Valhalla was founded in 1923 by two Los Angeles financiers, John R. Osborne and C. C. Fitzpatrick. The Spanish Mission Revival entrance structure was designed by architect Kenneth McDonald Jr. For the decorative stone castings, McDonald hired Italian-born sculptor Federico A. Giorgi, who had created 30-foot (9.1 m)-tall statues of elephants and lions for the 1917 epic film Intolerance and crafted the exterior of downtown's Million Dollar Theater. The gateway to the new cemetery cost $140,000.
The rotunda was dedicated March 1, 1925, with a concert by English contralto Maude Elliott. Picnickers spread blankets on the surrounding grassy expanse between three reflecting pools and flat cemetery markers, which were a new concept at the time. It became a tourist attraction and was used for concerts that were broadcast over radio station KELW by station owner Earl L. White. Just five months after the dedication, Osborne and Fitzpatrick were convicted of fraud. They had sold the same burial plots repeatedly — as many as 16 times — and netted a profit of $3 million to $4 million, according to Los Angeles Times stories of the era. They were fined $12,000 each and sentenced to 10 years in prison but served less than half the sentence.
The cemetery was taken over by the state. It is unclear how long the state owned the 63-acre (250,000 m2) cemetery, but Pierce Brothers bought it in 1950 and, within two years, closed the rotunda to vehicle traffic and moved the entry to the cemetery from Valhalla Drive in Burbank to Victory and Cahuenga boulevards in North Hollywood. There, they opened a two-story office and mortuary.
On Dec. 17, 1953 — the 50th anniversary of Orville and Wilbur Wrights' 12-second powered hop at Kitty Hawk — the rotunda was rededicated as the Portal of the Folded Wings. During the ceremony, the cremated remains of Walter R. Brookins were interred there. Brookins, the first aviator to take a plane to an altitude of a mile, had been the Wright brothers' first civilian student.
When sculptor Giorgi died in 1963, he was buried outside the structure, near his masterpiece. Gillette was also buried outside, near the shrine he helped found.
The cube-like shrine building was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake but restored and rededicated in 1996. Two years later, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1958, Pierce Brothers sold its family-owned chain of Southern California mortuaries and cemeteries to Texas financier Joseph L. Allbritton, who sold off 20 acres (81,000 m2) of Valhalla for development. In 1991, the cemeteries and mortuaries were acquired by Service Corp. International in Houston, but the Pierce Brothers sign remains at Valhalla.
Beneath the memorial tablets rest the remains of other aviation pioneers, including:
Note: this is a partial list. Use the following alphabetical links to find a name.
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