Dorena Osborn knew the city planned to remove her beloved Albany Hill cross from its perch overlooking California’s East Bay, but it was still a shock when she arrived at the hillside last month to find the giant landmark missing.
She and the cross go way back. Her grandparents placed the cross at the site in 1970. She and her family attend the annual Easter sunrise and Christmas services there. Her mother’s memorial service and her younger son’s dedication ceremony were held there. Her husband even proposed to her at the cross.
“We go there regularly to pray at about 8 a.m., and when we got there, it was gone,” Ms. Osborn told The Washington Times. “It was traumatic.”
The 28-foot metal-and-plexiglass cross may be out of sight, but that doesn’t mean it’s forgotten. Far from it.
Attorneys for the city of Albany and the Albany Lions Club squared off Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco over the city’s decision to invoke eminent domain to take the club’s easement, which has been used by worshipers for 50 years to access and maintain the cross.
The Lions Club was granted the easement as part of a 1973 deal in which the city acquired the 1.1-acre property from a third-party developer who purchased the parcel from Hubert Call, a community leader and Ms. Osborn’s grandfather. The land was subsequently turned into a public park.
The arrangement worked for decades. In 2015, however, a group called East Bay Atheists began raising questions about the cross’s constitutionality. Albany’s mayor criticized the Lions Club in 2017 for lighting up the cross, which is fitted with fluorescent bulbs, on the anniversary of 9/11.
“I want to reiterate that neither the City Council nor the City of Albany endorses in any way the lighting of the cross for any occasion, religious or nationalistic, or supports its continued presence on public property,” said then-Mayor Peggy McQuaid in a 2017 statement.
Litigation ensued, and in 2018, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the cross violated the Establishment Clause. The city was faced with a choice: Either sell to a private party the small plot of ground on which the cross rested or acquire the easement through eminent domain and remove the cross.
The City Council chose the latter, passing a resolution in April 2022 to condemn the easement. U.S. District Judge Somnath Raj Chatterjee granted the city’s request for prejudgment possession of the cross pending the outcome of the Lions Club’s lawsuit over the eminent-domain action.
The cross was removed June 8 over the objections of the Lions Club, which offered last year to buy the “underlying fee interest in the lot containing the cross from the City.”
“The cross would then be in private ownership — there would be no Establishment Clause problem,” said the Lions Club complaint.
Why not accept the offer? Albany Mayor Aaron Tiedemann said removing the cross was “consistent with our values.”
“The city has actually put its money where its mouth is, and our city looks a little bit more accepting now in a way that we think is consistent with our values,” Mr. Tiedemann told the East Bay Times. “For the small local group of people that really want to see the cross stay, when you’ve had such privilege for so long, losing it feels like being oppressed. That’s going to be an adjustment for folks, but I think we will all get used to it, and I think it’s a real benefit.”
In other words: The Albany City Council doesn’t want an outsized symbol of the Christian faith on display within its city limits, said Lions Club President Kevin Pope.
“The City Council seem to hate what it represents, and rather than take an amount of money for the land and sell it to the Lions Club, they’ve decided to spend what we think is probably close to $1 million to resolve this issue, instead of doing the easy thing,” Mr. Pope said. “That’s how much they hate it.”
The Lions Club lights up the Albany Hill cross every year for Easter sunrise services and Christmas, a sight that critics have decried as reminiscent of Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings, much to the chagrin of supporters.
“The city keeps bringing up cross-burnings in the 1920s, but they weren’t ever on Albany Hill,” Mr. Pope said. “If that cross on that spot had been associated with cross-burnings, we would have taken it down ourselves.”
Ms. Osborn called the KKK narrative “baloney,” pointing to a 1970 photo of the cross’ dedication ceremony, which was performed by a Black pastor.
She said her grandparents never would have agreed to the 1973 deal without the easement to protect the cross.
“The city should right their wrong,” Ms. Osborn said. “What we’ve been trying to get the city to do is put the easement back into private land for the Lion’s Club to continue what it’s always been doing, which is preserving the easement. And that would end any First Amendment questions.”
Disputes over prominent Christian crosses located on public property are nothing new, and many have been resolved by selling the patch of land under the Christian symbols.
In San Francisco, for example, the historic Mount Davidson Cross was preserved after the city sold the landmark’s one-third acre parcel to the Council of Armenian-American Organizations of Northern California in 1997.
The Mount Soledad Cross in San Diego was saved when the Mt. Soledad Memorial Association bought the land beneath the cross in 2015 from the Defense Department for $1.4 million, a move authorized in legislation signed the year before by President Barack Obama.
In 2017, the Neosho City Council in Missouri agreed to transfer ownership of a parcel on which sits a large cross at Big Spring Park to the nonprofit Save Our Heritage Foundation after complaints from atheist groups.
Supporters of the decision to remove the cross include the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which applauded the city’s “determined defense of secularism.”
“It’s very gratifying and satisfying news to see the city do the right thing, even in a political climate that isn’t very supportive of separation of church and state,” said foundation President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Kudos to Albany and their governance for fighting this and being so adamant.”
Even if the Lions Club wins its case, reinstalling the cross may prove difficult. Judge Alsup warned last year that as a practical matter, “once the cross is down, it is down for good,” given the likely challenges over zoning and permitting.
The city said it has placed the cross in storage. Neither the Lions Club nor Ms. Osborn knows where it is.
“It’s a sacred place to many, but there’s a few loud, vocal people who hate it,” Mr. Pope said. “But I believe the people who love it are a much bigger group than the people who don’t.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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