Commissioned by the parish of St. John's, then one of the society congregations of the Adams District, this Italian Romanesque Revival cathedral was begun in 1922 and consecrated in 1925. The parish dated to 1890 with an earlier frame church on the site, but the present building arose at the very peak of the district's prestige, its construction bankrolled by the same banking and oil families whose mansions lined Figueroa and Chester Place. Designed by brothers Pierpont and Walter Swindell Davis, the cathedral completed in the same year as St. Vincent de Paul one block west, the two churches forming a head-to-head Protestant and Catholic monument-building contest on the same boulevard in the district's last decade before wealth migrated to Hancock Park and Beverly Hills.
The design closely models the 11th-century church of San Pietro at Tuscania, north of Rome, and deliberately looks 900 years older than it is. A great wheel window commands the sculpted stone facade, flanked by arcaded corbel tables in the Tuscan manner. The basilican interior reveals a painted, trussed timber ceiling above marble columns, with rich mosaic work throughout. The reinforced concrete structure represented an early, sophisticated use of the material for full-dress historicist church building, a technical innovation cloaked in medieval dress.
