This is, indeed, a city founded on a promise—that a better life could be built here. And in a recent episode of Destination: Scientology, that founding impulse is revisited not through nostalgia but in the form of a question that still defines Sacramento: What, exactly, were people hoping to find when they came west?
For Church staff member Anna Bernard, the answer has always been about flourishing. “Sacramento is beautiful because it is about growth,” she says. “You would want to come to Sacramento to build a life.”
“People came to Sacramento and California to find gold, but gold was a way to live a better life.”
At the center of it all is the former Ramona Hotel, a seven-story Spanish Colonial Revival landmark dating to 1930. Painstakingly restored and brought back to life by the Church of Scientology—and celebrating its grand opening 14 years ago today, on January 28, 2012—the building retains its original tilework, iron details and architectural character, while incorporating modern sustainability features that earned it a coveted Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification.
But the building’s restoration is, appropriately, presented not as an architectural trophy in the heart of the city, but as a living space, brought back to purpose, where people can thrive.
That purpose is described repeatedly in human terms. “It’s really just the rediscovery of who they are,” says staff member Mike Klagenberg of how the Church empowers Sacramento citizens. Justin Reis, for his part, places that rediscovery in a longer historical arc: “People came to Sacramento and California to find gold,” he says, “but gold was a way to live a better life.”
“That’s what’s so exciting about it for me,” he adds, “is that original spirit of why Sacramento and California exist in the first place—we can fulfill that.”
Parishioner Don Pearson calls that kind of personal and spiritual development “golden”—“right there to be discovered by any individual.”
In Destination: Scientology, Sacramento, the city’s old promise is neither dismissed nor romanticized. Instead, it is refined, with the search for gold becoming something quieter and more durable: the work of helping people rediscover themselves—and, in doing so, build the better lives that first drew them west.
