Heads-on-a-wall and biblical figures overlook Yucca Valley at Desert Christ Park.

Desert Christ Park

Yucca Valley, California

Frank Antone Martin seemed normal. He had a house in Inglewood, California. He had a job at a Douglas Aircraft factory. He had a wife and two grown kids.

1953: Antone Martin and one of his larger-than-life JCs.

Then a gear shifted in Frank's head. He began to sculpt: not little coffee table statues, but Goliath-size figures that stood on the lawn outside his garage. Lacking the funds for marble, Frank built his statues out of concrete with skeletons of steel.

In the late 1940s Frank made a towering statue of Jesus with outstretched arms. He said it was a symbol of world peace and "the unity of mankind," and he wanted it placed on the rim of the Grand Canyon. The National Park Service, however, said no.

The press dubbed the statue "The Unwanted Christ," and a man named Eddie Garver heard about it. Eddie, known as "The Desert Parson," had put a plywood Jesus on a 90-foot-high hill overlooking Yucca Valley, a dramatic spot for the Parson's sunrise Easter service. He drove to Inglewood, found Frank, and convinced him that Frank's statue would be perfect on Eddie's hilltop. A phalanx of Yucca Valley volunteers then trucked the renamed "Christ in Concrete" 135 miles to its new home and dragged the three-ton statue up the dusty, rocky hillside.

YOU ARE THERE at the Last Supper. Pose with the Lord through a convenient window at Desert Christ Park.

Frank liked the biblical desert setting and he liked that the statue was up high. A lot of people would see it. An article in Life magazine said that Frank hoped that in Yucca Valley his Jesus "would outlast even atomic blasts."

Welcome to Desert Christ Park.

But the Desert Parson wanted more: an entire park of big biblical statues. Frank was happy to make them. By then, 1951, Frank had dropped his first name and was now known as just Antone Martin. Two years later he retired (age 66) and moved to Yucca Valley, where he lived in a trailer. He sported a little billy-goat goatee. He let his hair grow long. He wrote poetry ("The vast rugged hills so unmindful of time, In silence attuned to the grand cosmic rhyme"). In the park, on Sunday afternoons, Antone would sometimes put down his tools and sing for visitors. His wife stayed in Inglewood.

Antone sculpted several dozen statues for the park, called "gospels in cement," including at least ten different versions of Jesus, which Antone always faced south to get the most light. He and Eddie had a falling-out in 1957; Eddie left, Antone stayed, and the statue placement spilled across an adjacent hillside. Antone's most massive work, a unique Last Supper, was built into a wall that he also built, 32 feet high.

Antone died in 1961, and was buried elsewhere. The grounds were maintained by the Yucca Valley Parks and Recreation District until an ACLU lawsuit (separation of church and state) ended that relationship in the late 1980s, even though Antone had insisted that the park, despite appearances, was more spiritual than religious. In the early 1990s a series of California earthquakes badly damaged the untended statues (which turned out to be not bomb-proof after all). Heads and hands were severed; rebar stuck out like bone stumps.

Antone Martin works on his Garden of Gethsemane figures in 1955.

Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me.

To the rescue, once again, came Yucca Valley volunteers. They repaired the artwork and formed the Desert Christ Park Foundation, which now oversees the property. Antone's statues, faithfully restored, look today much as they did in the 1950s, when Antone was shaping the biblical figures with his chisel and trowel as he occasionally burst into song.

A rainless climate has protected the park from aggressive weathering. The statues, white and sunbaked, wrap the hillsides above the adjacent Living Hope Church. Groupings of figures stand and sit amid sagebrush and joshua trees, listening to the Sermon on the Mount, or disappointing Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, or mourning him at the open tomb. Antone's original Jesus -- the statue that started it all -- has been perched on his hilltop for nearly 75 years, and now represents the Ascension into Heaven.

Repaired hand.

Desert Christ Park is free (although donations are appreciated) and is open every day of the year. It remains perhaps the only place in the world where you can be a participant in The Last Supper. Antone's larger-than-life Supper bas-relief on that 32-foot-high wall features a cut-out window perfect for posing your head and shoulders next to JC, accessed today by an unofficial and narrow rocky path. Any pangs of sacrilege vanish when you see that the back of the tableau was tiered by Antone to expressly allow this visitor-friendly photo-op.