William Riker (1873 – 1969) and the Holy City

 The fact that you may have found your own way to enlightenment doesn’t mean that you are a nice man. Take the curious case of William Riker who founded Holy City in the Santa Cruz Mountains, conveniently situated just off the Santa Cruz highway, in 1918.

Riker had a chequered history before he found his own particular road to enlightenment. He made his living reading palms, earning the sobriquet The Professor, and travelled the country performing a mind reading act before the long arm of the law caught up with him for being an alleged bigamist. He skipped the border to Canada where he developed the Perfect Christian Divine Way. In essence, it required abstention from alcohol, a commitment to celibacy and communal living and a belief in the supremacy of the white race.

Coming back to the States Riker bought 30 acres of land for $10 just south of Los Gatos and established his commune where living quarters were segregated strictly by sex. Holy City, which never had a church – the now-styled Father Riker gave his followers the benefit of his wisdom from an adjacent redwood grove – started with 30 adherents who were mainly elderly and who had pledged all their wealth to their prophet. At its peak the commune had some 300 followers, all of whom had agreed to renounce their worldly possessions and to live without money.

But all in the gardens of Elysium was not rosy. Despite the strict celibacy rule, Riker married again. This breach so incensed one follower that he sued the Father but wasn’t able to obtain legal redress. Poverty may have been what the followers had signed up for but sack cloth and ashes weren’t for Riker. If you drove down the Santa Cruz highway in the 1930s you would come across a bizarre sight – eight statues of Santa Claus. You would also have come across notices enticing you to stop at Holy City – it was now a sort of motorway services for curious travellers. Amongst some of the claims were “The only man who can save California from going plum to hell. I hold the solution” and “Holy City. Headquarters for the world’s perfect government. Stop and investigate”.

For the less idealistic, what they could find there were attractions such as alcoholic soda pop, peep shows, a restaurant, an ornately decorated petrol station, a ball room, a hairdresser’s, a radio station and a zoo. In its pomp, Riker was making around $100,000 a year. Not everyone was welcome. Signs warned Asians and negroes to stay away until they had learned their place. Riker was a man of many contradictions. Despite the vow of abstinence he encouraged the restaurateur to open a bar, although he later revoked permission because too many of his followers were sampling the amber nectar. Despite being a rabid adherent of Adolf Hitler, he was very pally with members of the Jewish faith.

Towards the end of the 1930s when the economic conditions began to improve, it dawned on many of Riker’s followers that he was a fraud and a manipulator. By 1938 the community was down to 75 men and 4 women – the female population was particularly affected by allegations, never substantiated, that the Father forced himself sexually on them. What did for the commune was the building of a new highway which bypassed Holy City, Riker’s indictment for sedition in 1942 and a whopping $15,000 fine and the loss of most of his land in 1959 in a property deal that went wrong. In the same year a series of mysterious fires destroyed most of the buildings on the site and he lost control of the commune in 1960. When Riker died in 1969 – he had converted to Catholicism in 1966 – there were just three followers hanging on.

He was a charlatan and a nasty piece of work preying on the vulnerable with odious political and racist views. Another side of utopia, for sure.

Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: attractions of Holy City, Holy City, Los Gatos, racist views of William Riker, Santa Cruz highway, the eight staues of Santa Claus, the Perfect Christian Divine Way, William Riker