LOS GATOS, Calif. — It was called Holy City, but it was not exactly a model of Christian piety. It was, rather, a commune and tourist trap created in the 1920s by a white-supremacist huckster.

Now, decades after Holy City fell into ruin, the 142-acre site is a prime piece of real estate in the hills outside booming Silicon Valley, and it is up for sale for $11 million.

“Bad, good, or indifferent, there is a history here, and my hope is that somebody will take that history and spin it into a good thing for the future,” said Jim Miller, the real estate agent who is selling Holy City for three elderly investors who have owned the property since 1966.

Finding such a big swath of usable land in the San Francisco Bay area is unusual enough. But the listing of Holy City has also resurrected curiosity about the roadside compound lorded over in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’50s by William Riker, a former necktie salesman and palm reader who staged four campaigns for governor and corresponded with Adolf Hitler.

Fires, time, and a freeway have reduced to a few ramshackle buildings the community where Riker’s disciples sold food, gas, haircuts, and his “Perfect Divine Christian Way” doctrine on the main road between Santa Cruz and San Jose.

But plenty of people still remember the billboard proclaiming it as “Headquarters for the World’s Most Perfect Government.”The grounds held a dance hall, an observatory, a radio station Riker used to air his views, and outhouse-sized church steeples where visitors could watch saucy peep shows.

Betty Lewis, a local historian and author of “Holy City: Riker’s Religious Roadside Attraction,” recalls driving by as a child and that it resembled “a sideshow more than anything else.”

“My father didn’t want to stop there,” she said.”He thought it was in bad taste.”

Riker, who referred to himself as “The Comforter” and “The Emancipator,” preached racial segregation and instructed his followers, who never numbered more than 300 or so, to be celibate.

But Riker had a different standard for himself. He lived at Holy City with his fourth wife. While encouraging disciples to renounce worldly possessions, he drove Cadillacs.