Aimee Semple McPherson arrived in Los Angeles in 1918, an itinerant tent revivalist already known nationally for faith healing services that drew crowds by the thousands, and within five years her followers had raised enough money to build her a permanent home. Angelus Temple opened on New Year's Day 1923 in Echo Park, its auditorium seating fifty three hundred people beneath a poured concrete dome wider than any built in North America to that date, a scale meant to hold a congregation that had already outgrown every tent and hall available to it.
McPherson used the building as more than a sanctuary. In 1924 she put a radio station, KFSG, on the air from its towers, among the first religious broadcasters in the country. Three years later she organized the congregation into the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a name drawn from her account of a vision she read as picturing Christ as savior, healer, baptizer and coming king, and the denomination she founded there has since grown to millions of members worldwide.
The temple's most famous episode had nothing to do with doctrine. On May 18, 1926, McPherson went swimming at a Los Angeles beach and did not come back, presumed drowned until she reappeared thirty six days later at the Mexican border, telling reporters she had been kidnapped. Skeptics suspected a secret rendezvous with a former radio engineer instead, and a grand jury spent months hearing testimony on whether she had staged the episode, before prosecutors dropped every charge in December 1926 for lack of evidence.
McPherson led services at Angelus Temple until her death in 1944, and the congregation has occupied the same domed sanctuary since, now a National Historic Landmark whose grounds also house a social ministry serving Echo Park directly.