Artist Finds Holiness In The Ruins

It’s the shape of an ancient Middle Eastern cityscape, verandahs and towers, arched doorways and windows like peeping eyes. But it’s not anywhere near the Middle East; it’s on a rock hilltop in Waterbury, and it’s part of Holy Land USA — to some, a roadside attraction, to others, a place of serious pilgrimage, and for Joy Bush, the subject of an almost 40-year-long series of photographs.

Some of those photos are up now at City Gallery in a show called ​“Ruins of a Holy Land,” running through April 28, with a reception on April 13.

Holy Land USA was the lifelong pursuit of Waterbury attorney John Greco, who began building the site in the mid-1950s with a crew of volunteers. They created a chapel and stations of the cross, along with replicas of the town of Bethlehem where, according to the Bible, Jesus was born, catacombs, and, over time, much more. 

In its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, Holy Land served as both a religious shrine and a roadside tourist attraction, drawing an estimated 40,000 visitors a year. It was also still technically under construction. The New York Times reported in 1974 that Greco, a devout Catholic, was nearly done. He had started with his replica of Bethlehem, proceeded through parts of the Old and New Testaments, ​“creating out of cement and stone and bits of junk a 17‐acre religious theme park.” 

“Those who can find their way up steep, icy and winding unmarked streets to the top of Pine Hill here receive an hour‐long tour of exhibitions that include, besides the miniature Bethlehem, replicas of Jerusalem, the Crucifixion, the Garden of Eden, the Catacombs, the temptations of Christ, Mount Zion, the West Wall and dozens of other scenes,” the Times reported.

Greco’s motivations were thoroughly sincere, rooted in his religious faith. ​“Through Holy Land we show people the life of Christ and open the Bible to them,” Greco told the Times in 1974. ​“We don’t try to convert anybody, we just show them what we believe. I did it for the Lord, like a prayer.”

But the Times reporter, Michael Knight, also wasn’t blind to the way the place was put together. ​“The displays, built slowly by hand over the years, are a blend of professional‐quality sculptures, exhibits from the Vatican Pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair, and homemade assemblages of concrete, stovepipe, plastic sheeting and such,” Knight wrote. ​“The Garden of Eden, for example, is housed in a shed and decorated with plastic plants. Adam and Eve are mannequins from a local store’s children’s department.” He quoted one of Greco’s volunteers as saying that ​“we use anything we can get.” 

In 1984 it was officially closed to visitors. Greco lived there until he was taken to a nursing home, where he died in 1986 at the age of 90. The property was then left to an order of nuns called the Religious Sisters of Filippi, who held weekly prayer meetings there.

Bush first visited Holy Land USA in that year. By then it was ​“totally closed down and overrun with vegetation,” she said. She had known it was there since the 1970s, thanks to the enormous lit cross on the hillside overlooking Waterbury, visible from Route 8, but it took her a decade to finally visit. When she did, ​“I just felt like I was let loose in a fantasy world.” On one level, ​“it was kitschy and funny.” But on another level, she also felt ​“a sense of spirituality and calm.”

“There was something about the place that fascinated me,” she said. ​“I had discovered something, and I wanted to show someone else.” She was well aware of Holy Land’s reputation as a roadside attraction, but immediately thought that was short-sighted. ​“I think it’s just a little more than that,” she said.

She began to make trips back every five years or so with her camera to document more of the park, and the changes wrought by its closure. Along the way, her respect for the effort made to create the place deepened. Greco ​“put all these things together with his friends,” she said, out of generous sense of spirit. ​“He wanted people to be able to go to Bethlehem if they couldn’t go to the original place.”

She found herself often focusing on the distorted sense of scale Holy Land created. The buildings in the replicas are quite a bit smaller than they likely appear in photos; Bush reported that the structures in Churches reach perhaps the height of one’s hip. In person, they feel ​“miniature” and ​“delightful.” In pictures, without knowing how big they are, they change.

Over subsequent visits, she also realized she was documenting the place succumbing to nature and vandalism, and being maintained in sometimes surprising ways. Between visits, she noticed, a statue of Jesus had lost its original head and hands. Its replacement hands were the wrong size, and in place of a head was a sun, as from a sundial.

But she also knew that Greco and the people who helped him were ​“very serious about this place,” she said. ​“It was a labor of love and dedication.” And for many serious Catholics, ​“it brought a lot of comfort.” Like other artists who have worked to save the place, she understood something of Greco’s passion. ​“You think of artists who do installations,” she said. ​“This is one of them.”

With her visits to the site over the years, she also began to replicate in her photography practice the same kind of decades-long commitment Greco showed in building the place. ​“This is probably the longest project I have done,” she said, ​“documenting something that I felt had artistic value that was different and important to record. It still feels important to me.” 

Her documentation, though, wasn’t simply objective; they were a long way from forensics photos. She wanted to capture something of what she felt, and something of what she thought Greco felt. ​“He wanted people to experience what they had read about in the Bible,” she said. And some of those things were miracles. But as Holy Land continued to decay, she also sensed how the Holy Land project fit into other things Bush liked to photograph: things that got ​“left behind,” she said.

Holy Land was and is also inextricably bound up with the surrounding city of Waterbury, a connection made obvious by being there. From certain vantage points, Bush found that one seemed to blend seamlessly into the other. It was also a way to mark the changes; she pointed out that the view in Two Cities is no longer the same in part because some of the actual buildings in Waterbury are no longer there, replaced by newer buildings. 

The photos in the show end at 2008, but Bush has kept up her regular pilgrimage. Talk of restoring Holy Land had started when Greco died. Artists rallied to save it from demolition as early as 1988, championing it as a monumental piece of folk art. Multiple efforts to reopen it in earnest were mounted and stalled, and in 2002 the conversation about Holy Land still hadn’t changed much: restore or bulldoze? 

In 2008, some restoration began, starting with the installation of a new cross, but the park remained closed. In 2010, 16-year-old Chloe Ottman was raped and murdered by 19-year-old Francisco Cruz in the unused park after she rejected his advances.

In 2013, then-Waterbury mayor Neil O’Leary and car dealer Fritz Blasius bought Holy Land from the Religious Sisters of Filippi and announced plans to restore it. Those plans have yet to be fully implemented, but today the property is run by a nonprofit and hosts celebrations of Mass and prayer groups. The nonprofit’s website states that the park isn’t officially open, but visitors ​“are welcome to park near the gate and walk around Holy Land during daylight hours.”

Bush reported that so far restoration efforts have entailed taking out all the overgrowth — which she misses. With the plants’ removal, something of what drew her to the place in 1986 is gone. But just a month ago she visited it again with a young photographer; it was his first time there, and he was taken in as she had been.

So perhaps plenty of the draw remains, so long as some of Greco’s pieces are still there. He was compelled by his faith, and dealt in religious subjects. But in the end, like many artists, Bush said, he was also just trying to get people to stop what they were doing from day to day and focus on something else. He was ​“getting them to look, to pay attention,” she said.

“Ruins of a Holy Land” runs now through April 28 at City Gallery, 994 State St., with a reception on April 13. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.