Holy Land USA Cross

The lit cross that rises above Interstate 84 in Waterbury, Connecticut, marks Holy Land USA, a hilltop site that was once a Bible-themed park. The Boston Globe described it in 2025 as a 56-foot cross that, illuminated at night, seems to float in the sky. WSHU reported in August 2026 that a 65-foot cross towers over the site; the operator says the first cross, in steel, was 56 feet, and does not give a figure for the present one.

Holy Land USA was founded by local attorney John Baptist Greco, and opened to the public in 1958. He built miniature replicas of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and other places from salvaged materials, and the Globe says it drew an estimated 40,000 visitors a year in the 1960s and 1970s; the parish priest Father Jim Sullivan told WSHU about 45,000. The park closed in 1984 and decayed for decades. The cross was always there: the operator says it was first steel, then neon, replaced by a steel version in 2008, and by a color-changing LED cross in 2013. The Globe reports that Waterbury's then-mayor and a businessman bought the site in 2013 for $375,000 with a promise that it would remain Holy Land USA, and that the new cross, with 5,000 LED bulbs, was lit on Christmas Eve 2013 before a crowd of 20,000. The operator says the cross colour is changed in accordance with the Catholic liturgical calendar, with limited exceptions such as awareness campaigns.