Mission San Gabriel Arcangel
— bells in their wall, again.
Not only on a wall.
“The fourth of California's twenty-one missions, and the only one whose architect trained in Córdoba. Father Antonio Cruzado gave it capped buttresses and narrow windows. A fortress for prayer, on the plain east of what is now downtown Los Angeles. Six bells hang in the campanario, the oldest cast in 1795. A fire took the wooden roof in the summer of 2020. The community rebuilt, and the church reopened on the 252nd anniversary of its founding, to the day. The Tongva have lived in this valley far longer than any of it.
Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Mission San Gabriel Arcángel was founded on September 8, 1771, the fourth of twenty-one Spanish Franciscan missions established along El Camino Real in Alta California. Padres Pedro Cambón and Ángel Somera set the first chapel near the confluence of the San Gabriel and Río Hondo rivers, then moved the site roughly five miles north in 1775 after repeated flooding. The current location at 428 South Mission Drive sits in the San Gabriel Valley, about nine miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The mission served as the seed of the Pueblo de Los Ángeles, founded a decade later in 1781 by settlers led north from San Gabriel. It is California Historical Landmark No. 158 and a National Historic Landmark.
The current stone-and-mortar church was built between 1791 and 1805 to the designs of Father Antonio Cruzado, a Franciscan from Córdoba in Andalusia. He gave San Gabriel a profile that does not appear anywhere else on the mission chain: tall capped buttresses, narrow elongated windows, and a vaulted roof, echoes of the Great Mosque of his home city. The original bell tower collapsed in the 1812 San Juan Capistrano earthquake and was replaced by the campanario, a free-standing facade pierced with six bells in graduated arches. The oldest bell was cast in 1795. On July 11, 2020, a fire destroyed the wooden roof and most of the interior; restoration was completed and the church reopened on September 8, 2023, the founding anniversary.
The mission is an active Catholic parish and a working museum, open to visitors most days of the week. Self-guided tours of the church, the campanario, the soldiers' quarters, the original olive press, and the small cemetery typically take about an hour. Mass is celebrated daily in the restored church, with multiple Sunday Masses in English and Spanish. The grounds are about a thirty-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles in light traffic. A modest admission supports ongoing preservation; current hours and fees are posted on the mission's official site.