Riots, Love Fests, Buried Secrets: Griffith Park's Hidden Histories
Los Angeles, city of dreamers and doers; perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in over 4,300 acres of rolling hills, steep inclines and blessed flat land. Bordered by the 5 and the 134 freeways, Griffith Park, a sprawling landscape of chaparral, brushy scrubs and oak woodland, has been the canvas on which many Angelenos have drawn their dreams and aspirations.
Take for example, the Griffith Park Teahouse. Under a blanket of darkness in June 2015, a “ragtag group of L.A. enthusiasts built a Japanese-inspired teahouse — a love letter to the city. On the side of the structure, blank wood shingles hung on hooks, with a nudge to write down a wish for the city. By the end of the guerilla project, over 6,000 wishes were collected, including Stephanie’s, which read “hoping all these beautiful wishes come true ... and more rain.”
But long before the teahouse was even conceived, a lone pine tree stood sentry atop Burbank Peak. Some accounts say the tree has been standing guard for almost 40 years. It was Mark Rowlands, owner of a special effects lighting company, who first put an ammo box, journals and pens by the tree, but even then a binder already existed at the locally christened Wisdom Tree (aka The Giving Tree or Magic Tree or even the Tree of Life). One Wisdom Tree letter writer was Cadet Christian Beckler, who wrote, “Don’t have a clue how many times I’ve been here… this place seems to have a magnetic presence in a crazy life. It has brought me peace in times of hardship and difficulty. It is my church.”
Since Colonel Griffith J. Griffith and his wife, Mary Agnes Christina "Tina" Mesmer gifted the initial 3,015-acre land to the City of Los Angeles on December 1896, Griffith Park has also become the literal landscape where the city's never-ending and ever-changing answer to the question of its identity plays out.
“Griffith Park goes through all of the things that Los Angeles, California and the United States go through,” says Sarah Wilson, The Autry Museum of the American West’s education curator. The museum is currently working on “Investigating Griffith Park,” a community-led effort to build an exhibition surrounding the park in time for its 125th anniversary in 2021. “It is a microcosm of the city, of the country, of the region.”
Griffith Park is one of the few places where Angelenos can face the true diversity the city has to offer, says Casey Schreiner, founder and editor of Modern Hiker, and author of the forthcoming book, “Discovering Griffith Park: A Local's Guide.” “You've got hikers. You've got trail runners. You've got gardeners. You've got horseback riders. You've got tennis players. You've got golfers. You've got picnickers. You've got people who want to see a museum. It is one of the few places where Angelenos are kind of forced to get out of their cars and actually bump shoulders with people. It is a really kind of a magical place, I think.”
So magical that it’s become one of the most popular filming locations in Los Angeles. Since its inception, Griffith Park has stood in for a World War II battlefield, a billionaire vigilante’s dark lair and an aerospace defense complex, among many incarnations.
More importantly, it is also the set for real-life human drama. Here, hippies staged be-ins; men cruised for action after dark; cowboys and cowgirls put on the state’s first gay rodeo. It is where the day before Memorial Day 1961, 75 police officers were called to the park’s cheery merry-go-round (where Walt Disney purportedly dreamed up his Disneyland ambitions) to quell a crowd armed with rocks, baseball bats and bottles, angry over the carousel operator’s harsh treatment of an African American teen. At the time, the merry-go-round was routinely reserved for white families. Like elsewhere in the nation, especially in Alabama, the question of racial equality was raising a conflagration in Los Angeles.
Seven years later, Memorial Day 1968, once again by the merry-go-round, the scene was a more positive one: a “gay day” in the park. Men and women gathered to listen to civil rights activist Mike Hannon talk about working with the law in a homophobic society. “We don’t have too much left to remember the day, but we know that it enshrined Griffith Park in the public gay memory as a revolutionary place. Somewhere where gay stories could be told – eventually – out in the open,” wrote Henry Giardina on The Pride L.A.
Then, there are the strange things that have happened at the park: 1932 tourists carting away cups and buckets of Fern Dell’s magical, healing spring waters; 1979’s Tetrick Trail Run, an eight-mile run that seemed common enough, except for their real-life nude mile markers; or a long-running “breakfast club” with heavyweight members such as Cecil B. DeMille, Jack and Harry Warner and Tom Mix, founded on tenets of ham and eggs. “The idea behind ham and eggs is that everybody there is a ham and an egg,” says Los Angeles Breakfast Club president Lily Holleman, “Everybody has equal standing. Nobody’s better than the other. Nobody should take themselves too seriously.” For nearly a century, the club has been hosting a 7 a.m. Wednesday breakfast gathering near or at the park’s environs.
Griffith Park could have just become one of the many hilltop communities the city boasts of, where modernist homes set on stick legs teeter precariously on mountain faces or mansions command splendid vistas from their floor-to-ceiling windows, but it was Colonel Griffith’s caveat (that the land would be used “perpetually as a public park”) that intertwined the park’s destiny with that of the city’s.
Beginnings
Before it was Griffith Park, the land was home to the Tongva. According to Schreiner’s forthcoming book, there are at least three known settlement sites within Griffith Park: “one near Fern Dell, one west of Travel Town near Universal City and one where the Feliz adobe and ranger station are today.”
A Spanish land grant then gave José Vicente Feliz, a then-retired Spanish governor’s representative, permission to occupy 6,647 acres of this land just outside El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles after his service.
Under Feliz’s care, Rancho Los Feliz — which has also been translated to “The Happy Farm” apart from being named after Feliz — seemingly lived up to its name, “forming an integral part of the life of the young village [Los Angeles].” One account asserts that the rancho became the gathering place for rehearsals during Christmastime.
As California was annexed to the Mexican Federation, Rancho Los Feliz stayed in the hands of the Feliz family. Thanks to Doña María Ygnacia Verdugo, the Feliz family secured the land’s water rights and confirmed her title to the rancho. But nothing lasts forever.
As Dona Verdugo grew older, she deeded the land over to her daughters, who would sell it for $1 an acre. The remaining portion of the rancho passed on to her son, Antonio, whose death would spark rumors of the “Curse of the Felizes.”
The land would pass onto a series of owners until it was sold to Griffith, who finally gave 3,105 acres to the city of Los Angeles, even though it was outside the city limits. He correctly predicted the city would soon outgrow its current boundaries. The city was grateful for the windfall (Los Angeles Times called it a “princely gift”), but even from the beginning, it had no idea what to do with this swath of chaparral. It did, however, know it wanted what came with the land — water rights. In his acceptance speech, then-Mayor Frank Radner said the city’s “future depends on it.” Griffith Park didn’t just mean more green open space for Los Angeles; it meant greater control over the city’s water supply.
Making Landmarks
Like all generous gifts, this vast tract of land came with strings in the form of the Colonel himself. Griffith, with his outsized and complexpersonality, would be the park’s most vocal champion. As a self-appointed guardian angel for the park, Griffith called out city officials when illegal loggers cut down the Rancho’s many shade trees for profit under the city’s neglectful watch. He would support failed plans for Griffith Park to be turned into a federally-run arboretum. He backed efforts to build roads and transportation leading to the park. He dreamed of seeing an observatory (and the Greek Theater) built in his lifetime. Griffith would even present the city a gift of $100,000 towards its construction on Mt. Hollywood in 1912. His constant support of “an outlet for the population that chokes in the streets and alleys of our cities,” as he writes in his self-published book, “Parks, Boulevards and Playgrounds,” was work for the tireless and the Colonel had energy to spare.
After the Colonel’s death, his only son, Vandell Mowry Griffith (or simply Van), inherited the mantle of guardian to the park and the many projects it entailed. He would see the Greek Theater and the Griffith Observatory built. As municipal bus commissioner in 1919, he added a route into Vermont Canyon in support of low-cost transportation to Griffith Park. He would actively pursue a plan to turn the park into a lush forest complete with a network of sprinklers, greening the vast space. During a stint as park developer from 1920 to ‘21, Van proposed even more projects on Vermont Canyon, including tennis courts, campgrounds, picnic facilities and even a bird sanctuary.
Until today, Griffith’s descendants continue to watch over the park. They spoke out against the entrance fees to the park the city had introduced in 1981 (the fees were rescinded 3 years later) and pushed for historic monument designation in 2008. They continue to support community efforts to keep the park open for all through the Griffith J. Griffith Charitable Trust. "As time goes on here, we get farther away from who actually gave away the park," Griffith Van Griffith told the Los Angeles Times. "I don't know what the future would hold, but I hope the city respects that the Griffiths are still around, looking over their shoulder."
Van Griffith continued his father's legacy as caretaker of the park. Click right or left below.
City Dreamscape or Scapegoat?
As the city grew up around Griffith Park, it increasingly saw the park as the answer to its myriad problems. Faced with the city’s rapid growth and increasing crime rates, the Young Men’s Christian Association, the Parent-Teacher Association, the Social Welfare Commission, the Prisoner’s Friend Society and the Anti-Saloon League proposed the creation of a Municipal Prison Farm. A city ordinance passed January 2, 1918 set aside 120 acres on the remote northern side of the park, far from residential neighborhoods for the farm. Prisoners would build a four-room farmhouse, barn and tool shed. They’d grow potatoes, corn, alfalfa, cabbage, among other vegetables and sell it to the public. In exchange, they would get food, lodging and regular baths. The plan was a moderate success. No major incidents occurred, but economics (the farm didn’t break even) eventually shuttered this benevolent experiment in 1924.
After the farm closed, Griffith Park became a convenient encounter with the wild for young boys and girls. A boys’ camp opened February 27, 1926, just north of where Travel Town sits. Motion picture cowboys including Tom Mix, Monte Montana and William S. Hart entertained about 4,000 children. The camp had room for 100 boys. Cabins for ten boys each were made out of discarded utility poles and arranged in a circle. A converted barn with climbing ropes and whatnot hung from the rafters was their gymnasium. The rest of the site had a swimming pool, tennis courts, baseball diamonds and a football field.
A girls’ camp also opened the same year west of Wilson Golf Course with space for 120 girls. While no road was built to the girls’ camp (supplies and provisions had to be carried up by burro), it did have 16 cabins, a lodge, a dining hall, an outdoor sports area and a swimming pool set on a ledge.
Even today, Angelenos still get away and camp at Griffith Park. The boys’ camp hosts boys 7-17 years old and regularly plans events including summer camps, plus mother/son and father/son events. The girls’ camp now called Camp Hollywoodland also hosts summer and fall programs, mother/daughter and father/daughter weekends.
Griffith Park was also home to yet another camp, this time for the Civilian Conservation Corps, another of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs designed to employ young men in environmental projects around the park. The CCC also built three sites where they would live while working on these park projects. SP-13, which eventually was never used; SP-21, more commonly known as Camp Griffith Park and was visited by President and First Lady Roosevelt; and SP-40, which would eventually be occupied by Travel Town. All three sites would disappear from the park. The first was destroyed by fire of October 3, 1933. The latter two were dismantled as soon as CCC work in Griffith Park was deemed complete or near enough completion to turn over to park personnel.
“This is part of the whole problem of putting up a Griffith Park exhibition, you know,” says Wilson, “There are no monuments or plaques. All these moments exist through ephemeral pieces.” Again and again, key moments in city history played out at the park, only to be forgotten.
During the World War II, the former CCC camp near present-day Travel Town would be turned into a POW camp, sometimes processing transient prisoners on their way to more long-term facilities or vice versa, as fairly long-term accommodations for prisoners that couldn’t be handled by the other overcrowded facilities. Japanese, Italian and German prisoners saw Griffith Park not as an escape from the city, but a cage where their freedoms were curtailed.
In an oral history, Amy Uno Ishii remembers getting an anonymous phone call three weeks after her father George Kumemaro Uno was picked up by the FBI in the wake of Pearl Harbor. The caller suggested they drive down to Griffith Park. There, they found a slew of military police guarding their prisoners, one of which was their father. In an effort to add to his comfort, Ishii and her siblings pitched goods: soap, toothpastes, shaving kits and things, over the double enclosure that surrounded the POW camp. Uno was just one of potentially 550 prisoners that were held at the detention facility.
After the war, Los Angeles faced a housing crisis. Its veterans, who staked their lives on the battlefields, now had no place to stay. Once again, the city looked to Griffith Park for answers. Los Angeles responded by building the largest veterans housing project in the country, the Rodger Young Village, on 114 acres of the park where Van Griffith’s aviation park lay fallow. Dedicated April 27, 1946, before a crowd of 2,000 people and celebrities like Jack Benny and Bette Davis, the village welcomed its first residents about a month later. War veteran James Parkhill, his wife and two small children moved on May 23, 1946 after five months of living in a trailer behind the Hollywood Bowl. The family paid $35 every month to rent half of a Quonset hut. Parkhill’s family finally had two bedrooms (about a 100sqft. each), a 32-square-foot bathroom, electricity, plus hot and cold water. In short, a place to call home.
Very soon, a community truly grew around it. When Griffith Park turned 100 in 1996, Thayne Powell Martin wrote to the Los Angeles Times, recalling his childhood at the village:
In 1946, my family moved into a Rodger Young Village Quonset hut and lived there for almost three years.
We had all a small town needed: market, drugstore, malt shop, recreation room and laundry facilities (wringer washers, of course — the clothes had to be brought back to dry on the clotheslines beside each hut). A dental office looked out over the equestrian trail in the back of the village. I remember having a stubborn tooth removed while horses passed by.
There were few automobiles, although there was a small shuttle bus. The Pacific Electric Co. offered regular bus service from the park entrance to 5th and Main streets downtown. From there, you could walk to any of the great movie houses and have lunch at Clifton's Cafeteria or in Chinatown.
My sister and I were sent by bus to Le Conte Junior High School on Bronson Avenue in Hollywood. On weekends and during vacations, we hiked the hills to the observatory, the old zoo and our favorite place — the merry-go-round.
We scratched our names on the wood behind the Hollywoodland (now Hollywood) sign, pedaled our bikes along the park's roads and, when we had the money, rode the rental horses.
It was a wonderful time of our lives.
Despite Martin’s rosy recollections, life in the Village wasn’t without its controversy. Van immediately opposed the project, suing to stop the construction of the village. Buoyed by public support, however, the city eventually got its veterans’ village. “It is the imperative duty of State, county and municipal governments to provide temporary dwellings for ex-service personnel during the current home shortage,” were the sentiments of Justice Clement L. Shinn.
Its residents were also rescreenedafter resident Sidney Burke was found to be editor of a left-wing newspaper whose only qualification for occupancy was former service in the merchant marine. The screening found 15 families ineligible for tenancy; another 15 families voluntarily moved before being screened.
By 1952, World War II seemed further and further away in the minds of people, the housing crisis had also eased, and support for public housing also waned. Letters written to the Los Angeles Examiner called out the low rents at the village while “Cadillacs are as thick as flies.” With this change in public sentiment, city council committees agreed to review the matter of the village’s continued operation on a yearly basis. By December 1954, the half-moon huts were all removed and cleared away, and Rodger Young Village became just another half-remembered memory.
Photos depict the idealic quality of life that the Rodger Young Village offered veterans and their families as well as the construction of the community of huts. Click right or left below.
In a case of history repeating itself, last September, city committees approved building a temporary homeless shelter with 100 beds in Griffith Park on a 28,400-square-foot parking lot across the street from the Friendship Auditorium. The project is part of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s initiative to build one temporary emergency housing project in each council district. The shelter is slated to operate for up to three years and intends to transition homeless individuals to more permanent housing.
Eternal Environmental Questions
While controversy was brewing around the Rodger Young Village, the city was also grappling with a staggering air pollution problem. It was so bad that in 1943, residents were running away from what they had assumed was a Japanese gas attack. September 13, 1955 was declared Los Angeles’ smoggiest day in history, and science found that burning the city’s trash caused 30% of the basin’s smog-forming elements. Dumping the city’s trash was deemed more preferable than simply burning it away, but as more support mounted for municipally-owned dumps, no location in the city was large enough to handle that load, except, of course, Griffith Park.
By 1959, about half of the city’s combustible rubbish (about 1,200 tons) was dumped inGriffith Park’s Toyon Canyon. The 40-acre canyon could potentially handle about 9 million cubic yards of rubbish and, if not, Los Angeles Times writer Carlton Williams notes that another similarly sized landfill was available also at Griffith Park. Further down in his article, he would describe the dumping process:
“Layer after layer or rubbish is dumped daily in Toyon and compacted by huge bulldozers and other mechanical equipment. On top of the rubbish, layers of dirt at least a foot deep are distributed as a standard part of the fill operation. At long last, after many layers of rubbish have been compacted, the city will have a 40-acre level plot which will be devoted to new recreational facilities such as baseball, tennis, archery and kindred sports.”
The dumpsite/recreational park rhetoric continued for more than a decade after. “Garbage Fills May Be Future Garden Spots,” declared 1970 Los Angeles Times article, but by 1985 Toyon Canyon reached capacity accepting 1,600 tons of refuse a day. The dump finally closed that same year with 16 million tons’ worth of refuse buried in compacted layers at the park. The city’s trash was then diverted to a Valley landfill, a problem not quite solved, just pushed beneath a different geographic rug.
The city’s relationship to its flagship green space has always been a complicated one, especially when it comes to matters of ecology. From the start, the city couldn’t decide how to develop the park. Would it be a majestic manicured park filled with recreation and entertainment? Or could it be, in the words of T.S. Van Dyke in Charles Lummis’ “Land of Sunshine,” “a park where nature will ever reign”? The question lingers until now.
Miguel Ordeñana has lived right outside Griffith Park all his life. Now an environmental educator and wildlife biologist working at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, he credits his childhood at the doorstep of this urban refuge for his early introduction to wildlife. “It was this mini-Yosemite for me,” says Ordeñana of his early brushes with Griffith Park, “I would have run-ins with coyotes and skunks in the neighborhood just because of how close I lived to the park. It was really cool because it allowed me to be in nature. The Santa Monica Mountains were just too far for my family to really explore, and so Griffith Park was it for me.”
Despite living so close to the park as a child, Ordeñana was happy — but also upset — not to find out Griffith Park hosted stunning biological diversity and richness until he was in graduate school. Griffith Park is wholly within the California Floristic Province, one of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots. It is home to a wide variety of plants and animals (including 17 “special-status species”), threatened by their very urban surroundings, and the city had no clear understanding of these flora and fauna’s dire circumstances.
Griffith Park is so close to the heart of L.A., yet ironically it has been overlooked and understudied. “When I was part of the [Griffith Park] Master Plan Working Group in 2005 or 2006, some of us realized the city really has no documentation whatsoever of what they have in this park on the flora or fauna side. Just nothing. No lists, no nothing,” says Gerry Hans, who is now the Vice President of Science and Conservation with Friends of Griffith Park, a group he helped found in 2010. In response to that blindspot of information, George Grace (another member of the Griffith Park Master Plan working group) plus a few friends scraped together money from nearby homeowners’ associations and personal donations to start a Griffith Park Natural History survey in 2006.
“That led to other studies, so we just kept layering on the studies,” says Hans. To date, Friends of Griffith Park has undertaken 14 studies within the park, studying carnivores, raptors and rare plants among a few subject areas. Their most famous study is the ongoing Griffith Park Connectivity Study, which literally put the lone mountain lion P-22 on the list of L.A.’s local celebrities. The group’s work was further bolstered when, in 2007, a fire swept through 800 acres in the southeast corner of the park. The City then retained Cooper Ecological Monitoring, the same biological consulting firm Hans had been working with, to figure out what flora and fauna actually called the park home and how best to take care of it.
The Griffith Park Wildlife Management Plan was the first plan of its kind done by the city, undertaken only 111 years after its donation to Los Angeles. As the document notes:
The park has a history of heavy usage by people…this history of use has come at a great cost to many species of plants and animals. Based on recent surveys, several dozen plants and animals for which we have museum specimen records are believed to be now extinct in the park. These include fragile wildflowers like the Brewer’s redmaids Calandrinia breweri, as well as charismatic birds like the golden eagle Aquila chrysaetos, which used to nest in the park during the early 1900s. Many other species are known from tiny, discrete areas of the park, and may “blink out” without our attention and action. Each local extinction, or extirpation, degrades a bit of the park’s – and the earth’s – biodiversity, and it is the duty of park management and the concerned public to ensure that these species have a fighting chance to survive.
The plan laid out the different kinds of plant communities and habitats at the park, both terrestrial and aquatic. It also identified plants and animals park managers should take special care of, such as the Coast Horned Lizards, Cooper’s Hawks and Nevin’s barberry, one of the rarest plants in the country.
P-22 isn't the only thing worth keeping an eye out for in Griffith Park. We asked Gerry Hans of Friends of Griffith Park to help us get to know a few more. Meet a few animals and plants that call Griffith Park home. Click right or left below.
The Friends of Griffith Park’s survey work and the city’s management plan are invaluable for conservationists looking to preserve the city’s emerald heart because as every member of these scientific undertakings know, danger, the homo sapien kind in particular, could literally be in every corner.
Griffith Park welcomes about 12 million visitors a year, estimates Schreiner, a figure that often outstrips numbers posted by the nation’s top national parks. “The fact the Griffith gets more than some of those marquee parks like Zion and Yosemite is pretty nuts!” says Schreiner. Each of these visitors to Griffith Park are looking for a slice of paradise in a concrete-laden city, but many are leaving an unfortunate mark on Griffith Park. Going off-trail, wildlife feeding and off-leash dogs are only some of the no-no’s that easily go unpoliced in such a sweeping park, notes its Wildlife Management Plan.
And then, there is a question of vegetation.
Since its inception, the park has already been home to immigrants of the photosynthetic kind. Once Griffith’s donation was made public, small donations, as well as walnut trees and banana plants arrived on the city’s proverbial doorstep. Fern Dell, a favored getaway for Angelenos from heat, has California coastal redwood and native coast live oak, as well as fern transplants from Africa, South America, Australia and Asia. Its shade offers refuge to the likes of red-eared slider turtles, crayfish, goldfish and guppies, none of which are native to Los Angeles or even California.
Like a lighthouse helping orient stray vessels from foreign shores, Griffith Park has called to immigrants, who in turn have given back to the park ... in time, in sweat and in devotion. Time and again, people have been drawn to the park and have made their mark on the land in the form of gardens.
First, there was the mysterious man of Captain’s Roost. In a Los Angeles Times article, longtime park visitor Erna Budzislawski remembers "a man from the Balkans and probably about 35 years old.” Rene Ortiz remembers a man everybody just simply called captain “because he was supposed to have been a captain in the Armenian army.”
After this anonymous captain came Brazilian-born Italian Dante Orgolini in the 1960s. With a shovel and a few trees in a bucket, he created an arboretum of sorts on Mount Hollywood, now called Dante’s View.
Then, Amir Dialameh, a native of Iran, once a customs officer at the Tehran airport, found his corner of Griffith Park. Working six to eight hours a week, seven days a week, Dialameh hiked up the Mineral Wells trail doing what needed to be done to create a place for himself and others like him.
“Only in America can a man build something like this for himself,” Dialameh told Los Angeles Times. His garden consumed him, as it did Kristin Sabo, who would spend 14.5 years as steward of Amir’s Garden following Dialameh’s passing.
“In the first one or two days of moving to Los Angeles, I found Griffith Park,” says Sabo. Her first introduction to Griffith Park was also the day she met Dialameh in his garden. “I just thought it was the coolest place. Just try to keep me out of it,” says Sabo of that fateful September day in 1995. Her passion for the garden and park was such that at one point, Sabo was spending 1,000 hours a year there, sometimes building stairs, sometimes watering the plants, doing what needed to be done.
Over the years, Dialameh would introducepine, jacaranda, geraniums, oleander and bougainvillea in his garden, not natives because eco-consciousness during the ‘70s was not what it is now, but just beautiful vegetation. By the time Sabo came on board Amir’s Garden full time, it also functioned as a fire break, apart from a shady rest stop, an ornamental garden and a memorial garden. Under her care, the plant palette emphasized jade, aloe vera, succulents that would slow fires down; non-native plants and invasives would be discouraged as much as possible.
But Sabo could only do so much. “Somebody once planted bamboo everywhere. I had to scour the entire garden and remove it all. They had been thorough. They were going to turn the entire thing into a bamboo garden,” says Sabo. Dealing with illicit activity and negative behavior, it turns out, became a large part of her caretaking duties. That and constantly championing the garden’s interest and coping with the city’s often indifferent management policy for the garden soon weighed heavily on her.
A few months before her 15th anniversary as steward, Sabo left the garden. “I chose to do so when the Department of Recreation and Parks chose to disrespect and deface Amir's Garden and not engage in any conversation or discussion about their actions,” she says. Sabo has yet to return to the park. “The park’s dead to me,” she adds, “They’ve decided to commercialize [it] and I’m not going to watch them do it.” Her qualms are, sadly, not unique.
Rowlands, who encouraged hikers to leave their thoughts at the Wisdom Tree, has also stayed away. “The land where Wisdom Tree grows was purchased, and then I believe donated to Griffith Park. As now it became public land, it got on the map and Google even listed the trail. The tree got carved and broken, litter, the rock wall disintegrated and it just became a photo op, so now I don’t go there,” Rowlands wrote in an email.
The Battle of the Masterplans
Since its inception, Griffith Park’s identity has teeter tottered between an untouched escape from city woes and full-scale recreational facility, developed pointedly for public amusement. Its 1939 master plan by landscape architect Ralph D. Cornell imagined keeping the park’s rustic charms and recommended planting only natives on the upper, more remote parts of Griffith Park, but developing the flat areas for recreational activities.
In contrast, the 1968 plan bore the marks of a high-energy 1960s Los Angeles eager for growth and expansion. It imagined automobiles traversing every part of the park, even its most remote sections; building new parking lots to accommodate the extra traffic; and even waterfalls and lagoon attractions. Eberts writes:
The plan proposed turning Griffith Park into a recreational wonderland of lakes (40 of them!), rivers, streams and waterfalls located in natural flow drains …The lakes could be used for swimming, fishing and boating. Three of the park’s projected 10 waterfalls would be over 100 feet high. The capper, though, would be a 500-foot waterfall crashing down from the top of Mt. Hollywood.
Perhaps subconsciously competing with nearby theme parks, Disneyland and Universal Studios, or facing the high costs of maintaining such a large swath of land, the 2005 master plan floated to the public included aerial tramways, a mountain hostel and an L.A. River “pleasure pier.”
“The community objected to the draft master plan greatly,” says Hans. In turn, he and other community members worked on a master plan of their own, which was finally adopted, tellingly, as a “vision” plan rather than a master plan in 2014. The community’s plan again tipped the scales the other way, in nature’s favor. The group wanted to see Griffith Park maintained with an “Urban Wilderness Identity” that would support the park’s rich biodiversity in the park while also keeping public access to the park.
“We feel strongly about public access to the park,” says Hans, which is why Friends of Griffith Park joined Los Feliz Oaks Homeowners Association and the Griffith J. Griffith Charitable Trust sued to reverse the city’s closure of Beachwood Drive gate, one of the most direct hiking trails to the Hollywood sign. Finding the funds to maintain the park and perhaps even to profit from it has been a constant concern for the city and this often puts them at cross purposes with Colonel Griffith’s wishes for the public — even those with little means — to enjoy the land.
Various maps show the changing plans for Griffith Park throughout the years.
Possible Futures
One idea that never seems to die is for a Griffith Park aerial tram. Last July, the city contractedEdmonton, Alberta-based Stantec Inc. to study options for the ride. Before that, the 2005 draft master plan included trams. Warner Brothers also proposed a $100 million tram from its lot leading up to the rear of the Hollywood sign. Even entertainment mogul Barry Diller and his wife, fashion designer, Diane von Furstenberg, have offered a $30 million plan for a tram between the L.A. zoo parking lot and the iconic sign.
"The biggest single long-range threat to the park is overdevelopment," Eberts told Daily News. "I think the open space in the park should take priority — once the land is developed, you don't get it back."
What will the future of the park be? It is a question answered over and over again, not by a lone agent, but by collective effort. No matter what its future, what’s clear is that Griffith Park has already become a park adopted by its people — despite its lack of clarity, or maybe because of it. Perhaps it is Griffith Park’s unclear, ambiguous identity that has allowed Angelenos for over a century to clarify for themselves what the park means to them.
“You’ve got the big capital H history that happens on Griffith Park, like the Tongva, the military stuff, the Japanese detention, those kinds of moments. But then, you also have all these personal stories that are equally important. I’ve heard so many stories of people getting engaged while hiking through the park, people who’ve had their quinceañeras here, who walk their dog here or even met the love of their life here,” says Wilson. The silent oaks, the whispering chaparral, the dusty trails, they have all been witnesses, day after day, to a city writing its history.
More Short Stories of Griffith Park
The Curse of the Felizes
One of the most repeated ghoulish stories of Griffith Park is the Curse of the Felizes. It was said that when Don Antonio Feliz was struck by smallpox, he sent his 19-year-old niece Petranilla away, keeping only his housekeeper Soledad in the household. When Petranilla returned after her uncle’s death, she found that Don Antonio’s will was not what she expected. Soledad received some furniture, but Petranilla got nothing, not a penny or even a small plot of land. Instead, Don Antonio signed his land over to an acquaintance, Antonio Coronel, who visited the dying man along with an unnamed lawyer. Angry over this injustice, Petranilla uttered the Feliz curse. “A blight shall fall upon the face of this terrestrial paradise, the cattle shall no longer fatten but sicken on its pastures, fields shall no longer respond to the toil of the tiller, the grand oaks shall wither and ides! The wrath of heaven and the vengeance of hell shall fall upon this place.”
A Matter of Rank
Despite the many references in this article to Griffith J. Griffith's military status, there has been no proof that he has achieved such a rank. The highest rank found for Griffith was a commissioned major with the 1st Brigade of the California National Guard. The Colonel was a complex character with a history of violence and domestic abuse, for more on that, read this article
Van Griffith, Airman
An avid aviator, Van also operated the Griffith Aviation Park, where the Greater Los Angeles Zoo parking lot, the Autry Museum of the American West, the intersection of Interstate 5 and Ventura Freeway and the Jon Ferraro Soccer Fields all sit today. The aviation field saw the likes of now-familiar aviation names Glenn Martin, Donald Douglas and William Boeing come through. The air above Griffith Park was also where on June 20, 1913, Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick became the first woman to parachute from a plane. Glenn Martin hired the 4’8” woman to demonstrate his newly invented “free fall” parachute.
Sources
Eberts, Mike. Griffith Park: A Centennial History. Los Angeles, CA: Historical Society of Southern California, 1996.
Schreiner, Casey. Discovering Griffith Park: A Local's Guide. Seattle, WA: Mountaineers Books, 2020.
Top Image: A view of the Wisdom Tree in Griffith Park from a helicopter October 13, 2019 | Mark Rowlands
