By Melissa Sirois
“I think it was probably the late ‘90s or the early 2000s that I went up there—when it was all falling apart.”
So says Raechel Guest, Director of the Silas Bronson Library in Waterbury, Connecticut. The “up there” that she speaks of is Holy Land U.S.A., a now-abandoned religious theme park spread atop Pine Hill that overlooks Interstate 84 and Route 8.
Devout Catholic John Greco began building Holy Land in 1955, using scraps of wood, rock, chicken wire, tin and cement to recreate the village of Bethlehem, the tomb of John the Baptist and various other scenes from the Christian bible. The park opened just a few years later.
“It began as a peace park,” said Michael Dooling, archivist at Waterbury’s Mattatuck Museum. “I believe it was the most popular tourist attraction in the state in the ‘60s, even though today we’d think it was kind of hokey.”
“I think it was probably the late ‘90s or the early 2000s that I went up there—when it was all falling apart.”
So says Raechel Guest, Director of the Silas Bronson Library in Waterbury, Connecticut. The “up there” that she speaks of is Holy Land U.S.A., a now-abandoned religious theme park spread atop Pine Hill that overlooks Interstate 84 and Route 8.
Devout Catholic John Greco began building Holy Land in 1955, using scraps of wood, rock, chicken wire, tin and cement to recreate the village of Bethlehem, the tomb of John the Baptist and various other scenes from the Christian bible. The park opened just a few years later.
“It began as a peace park,” said Michael Dooling, archivist at Waterbury’s Mattatuck Museum. “I believe it was the most popular tourist attraction in the state in the ‘60s, even though today we’d think it was kind of hokey.”
While there has never been an official designation making Holy Land Connecticut’s most popular tourist attraction of the 1960s, Dooling is correct about the park’s widespread popularity. At the zenith of its success in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Holy Land was drawing more than 40,000 visitors each year, according to The New York Times.
In the mid-1980s, the park closed to the public, and when Greco died in 1986, nearby nuns took ownership of the park. Over the years, the grounds stopped being taken care of, and the park was eventually abandoned.
“It’s not that there was a contributed decline [in] popularity,” said Chuck Pagano, President of the Board for Holy Land Waterbury U.S.A., the non-profit that now owns the land. “It was just that it was sort of closed down from anyone having access to it to continue its life.
“It’s been 30 years of growth and neglect. There has been no caretaker up there for 30 years.”
Pagano said that although nuns were teaching and living in the area, the park remained abandoned and uncared for until 2013. Once the nuns sold Holy Land to the non-profit, though, a reenergizing began.
In December of that year, just before Christmas, the non-profit organization erected a new 59-foot lit cross on the hill. This was the fourth cross Holy Land had seen in its lifetime, but it was the tallest and brightest of them all.
According to Pagano, approximately 5,000 community members attended the cross lighting. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I remember it as a child—being able to look up at the cross from my bedroom window,” he said. “It’s really a cultural icon in the city for those of us who have been here for a long time.”
Today, Holy Land is featured on websites that profile abandoned theme parks, “creepy” destinations and sites filled with mystery. Strange New England, a website dedicated to “New England’s legends, curious history and weird destinations,” says the park has a “post-apocalyptic aesthetic.”
Still, no matter the reason, Holy Land continues to draw in visitors from surrounding areas, though not in the numbers it did in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“A lot of people feel that hill has a lot of power,” said Edward Hughes, a churchgoer at the First Assembly of God in Waterbury and Holy Land volunteer dedicated to restoring the park. “There [are] a lot of people that feel that land is powerful in certain ways.”
A simple Instagram search turns up hundreds of filtered photos of the “Holy Land U.S.A.” sign, which rests on the slopes of the hill similar to the way the “Hollywood” sign does in California. Perhaps even more images show teens and young adults in prayer position beneath the giant cross.
“No trespassing” signs are posted around the park, although Pagano said there isn’t much Holy Land Waterbury U.S.A. can do to patrol the area or enforce the rule. Of those who find their ways to Holy Land, he said, “We can’t stop them. We don’t have full-time security. There is nobody in particular managing the entrance or exists.
“We prefer that people do not go wandering around because, quite frankly, it is still a construction site,” he said.
“No trespassing” signs are posted around the park, although Pagano said there isn’t much Holy Land Waterbury U.S.A. can do to patrol the area or enforce the rule. Of those who find their ways to Holy Land, he said, “We can’t stop them. We don’t have full-time security. There is nobody in particular managing the entrance or exists.
“We prefer that people do not go wandering around because, quite frankly, it is still a construction site,” he said.
Other than the slow deterioration of the park over the decades, it appears as though Holy Land is fairly positively represented in Waterbury and across the state.
But there is one incident that is impossible to ignore. In 2010, a 16-year-old girl was strangled, raped and stabbed at the foot of Holy Land’s giant cross. Although her killer was quickly sentenced to 55 years in prison, for many people, the murder left a figurative dark cloud over the grounds for some time.
Following the news of the crime, video cameras were installed all over the park. “At that point, [Holy Land] was an isolated outpost in the city that had no traffic,” Pagano said. He said the murder was an anomaly and that the local community has since worked to move on.
Aside from restoring the park’s reputation as a safe and peaceful place to visit, Holy Land Waterbury U.S.A. is also working to restore the physical land on which the park was built. The non-profit organization accepts donations and does its best to make do with what limited funds and volunteers are available. “This is a slow, arduous process,” Pagano said.
Still, the group has made some progress. It has worked to eliminate a fair amount of overgrown and dead trees across the park, and the board frequently holds meetings to discuss restoring the replica catacombs and adding new roofs to some of the structures.
Support for the park’s restoration has come from all over. “A lot of different parts of our city’s population have chimed in and asked and helped out in whatever way they can,” Pagano said.
He said the interest in Holy Land’s restoration has a taken a “religious agnostic” approach, with people of Christian, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim faiths contributing to the cause.
The diversity is fitting, especially since one of Greco’s goals was to open Holy Land to all. “He thought that nobody, no matter the race, creed or color of the individual, should be excluded from interacting with Holy Land,” Pagano said.
“It really is just stunning when you go up there because you fell like you’re just way up above everything, and you can see everywhere,” Guest said of the view from Holy Land atop Pine Hill. “So even if there was nothing there but rock and some shrubs, it still would be an incredible experience.”
Nothing there? Not if the people of Holy Land Waterbury U.S.A. have anything to say about it.