Griffith Park: The Untold History | Lost LA | Season 4, Episode 1 | KCET

when it comes to understanding Griffith Park size is the enemy at more than 4,500 acres it's one of the largest municipal parks in the nation its boundaries are so expansive its terrain so rugged there's no one place you can stand to take it all in but it's impressive scale is also a mix Griffith Park so charming an abandoned Zoo can coexist with a merry-go-round a rock band can rattle one side of the park while on the other side a mountain lion silently stalks its prey with such sweeping diversity of landscapes and uses how can we make sense of this place can we even say who it's for the answer to these questions begins at one of El is hidden treasures the city archives la is an idea as much as a city a landscape of aspirations and imaginations behind the idea of la are the stories of people dreamers seeking fortune or reinvention and those who saw the dream as an illusion so let's uncover clues to have forgotten past in the archives Lost la explores the untold history behind the fantasy of California Lost la is made possible in part by a grant from an r/a Foundation a Margaret a Cargill philanthropy the Ralph M Parsons Foundation and the California State Library [Music] so Mike I'm researching Griffith Park and I figured I had to start at the city archives you probably have everything here right not everything but quite a bit I mean this room is huge and I just see boxes everywhere I look there's approximately 200,000 boxes in any given time what do you got on Griffith Park we'd have recreation and parks commission materials okay so they were the ones obviously who were running the park yeah we would have the master plans we would have the concessions contracts leases all sorts of correspondence and ephemeral stuff we can take what you have here and sort of reconstruct the entire history of Griffith Park well certainly as far back as the the original donation of the property in 1896 even though that story right I mean I know the cynical take is that Griffith donated it to the city to get rid of the tax liability this is a huge parcel of land oh absolutely it was like an island beyond the city limits the park did not sound anything like what people have thought of when they were thinking of what a city park would be sure because the best thing you could say about Griffith Park at that time was it was completely unmanaged and about as wild as anywhere around so how did the City Council respond when Griffith wanted to give them this huge parcel of wild land well they were of course they accepted yeah you know they were they weren't stupid you know they were they were they were going to take the land and they would figure out what to do with it later of course Griffiths never really quite let go of it I mean even after he donated the land he was constantly writing to the Park Commission who were overseeing it and complaining continuously about abuses to the to the park yeah and who was gonna pay for it whatever was going to be done with it and so there's an awful lot through here let's go his way I think what you want to see is right here on our wall and it is right here this is the deed to the original 3,000 acres at Griffith Park that Griffith donated 1896 so this document here or this indenture as it says this is the birth of Griffith Park absolute you love Elly's Park system it certainly is that's why we have it out on display all the time so what does it say here to be used as a public park for purposes of recreation health and pleasure for the use and benefit of the inhabitants of the said city of Los Angeles forever as well says says forever right in the document well then it says down here if those conditions are not met the deed reverts back to the Griffith family yeah I like to see how well that would go so this is a formal legal document why is it so big well it's Griffith Park I mean a standard deed wouldn't do the job 3,000 acres think about who we're talking about to Griffith J Griffith I mean the man did nothing by half measures right and so why not do something this grandiose because the gift was granting us in my quest to explore Griffith parks past I headed to the Autry museum of the American West where I met with Sarah Wilson Zahra and the Autry staff are working on a collaborative project titled investigating Griffith Park that will create something near and dear to my heart the first extensive archive dedicated to Griffith parks history so it's just at the city archives and I saw you know there they have the original deed that transferred this land from Griffith to the city of La they have had framed up up there and that's coming here yeah and we have documents that celebrate that and we also have history around that as well so we'll be collecting all of this with the intention that some day this is an archive that can be added to and shared with the wider world so it's remarkable just how big Griffith Park is most city parks are not on this scale yeah and I mean I'm sure there's just so much histories happened within these boundaries here it's a history that goes back for forever history and larger movements of Los Angeles of Southern California of California of the American West and the nation at large these are stories that celebrate Los Angeles that celebrate our residents our neighbors tourists we're essentially kind of finding the archives that live in people's memories that live in their closets so that we can build an exhibition collaboratively and to learn really what makes this place so important right it really makes sense of poetry is doing this yes we are we are in Griffin Georgia not everyone realizes that it is our backyard it is our community yeah and so it makes sense that we would take this project on and expand it and expand on it well that's wonderful can't wait to see it someday okay see oh hey how's it going hey great to see you yeah so you want to spend a little more time inside the park yeah horses horses already let's go I got my cowboy thank you few people know Griffith Park slower better than Ryder Casey Shriner founder of the popular modern hiker web site and although walking is definitely Casey's preferred mode of transportation we had a lot of park land to see so we borrowed a couple horses and saddled up so there are a lot of cynical explanations for why Griffith donated this land of the city but I think even if we grant all that it's clear that he really did believe in public parks oh absolutely you know there's a lot of ulterior motives for those tax dodge reasons you know this wasn't the first or the last thing that Griffith donated or sold at a loss to the city yeah but Griffith definitely cared about parks you know he toured Europe with his family and really found that all the major cities there and other cities in the u.s. like Boston and Hartford had extensive city parks and he really wanted something similar for Los Angeles because he saw la being a big city on the west coast and thanks to his affection for parks la has one of the largest municipal parks in the country yeah it was at the time of its donation I think it might have been the largest it was you know five times the size of Central Park in New York and at the time this wasn't even part of LA boundary so we we did a pretty good job on that first run all right shall we yeah all right we'll see you guys later don't go anywhere [Music] now we're gonna Park Ranger headquarters awesome and there is a visitor center here right right this is the historic Adobe the oldest building in Griffith Park yep yeah think what these walls date to 1853 yeah probably around that time yeah adobe of the Rancho Los Feliz so many of the the Adobe's from the old Mexican Spanish times a very easily could have been torn down yeah place by something more modern the interiors all redone and is like a very modern office but the fact that the exterior still this original wall is pretty cool one of the things I love about Griffith Park is that there all these layers of history going back you know hundreds or even thousands of years and this Adobe here seems like one of the best examples of that yes so this is the only building remaining from the original ranch all those Feliz there used to be more obviously various fires and things took them down and there was one woman in particular Dona Maria Ignacia Verdugo who was a widow of one of the felices and she really secured the land rights and the water rights during a time when this was Spain then New Spain then Mexico and then America and her paperwork basically survived all of that transition so she was a very smart lady certainly and and the filiz family they were not the first ones here Jose even said de Felice was one of the guys who came through in 1775 on the De Anza expedition basically from Mexico up to Monterey they were the first Europeans to come through what is today Griffith Park they camped somewhere along the LA River we're not exactly sure where but there is was actually the danza National Historic Trail is right behind this building that runs from Arizona up to Monterey today it's conceivable they could have camped here I'm insane they could have camped oak tree but the people who were here before them were the gabriella no tongba right and there is evidence now that initially I thought there was kind of one settlement in Griffith Park and now new scholarship is leading towards maybe three and one of them might be here so they're still working on that they were here for obviously thousands of years before the Spanish ever even knew but this is the place they could walk to so why isn't this Park today called you know Tongva park or Felice Park well part of it is just because a sort of general cultural blindness to the indigenous people who were here yeah I'm kind of grunt country why but especially here in LA we're getting better about it there's a lot more people who are kind of coming forward and telling those stories which is great but the reason it's called Griffith Park is because after the loss felices kind of lost it through some potentially shady dealings with American lawyers the land past hands a couple times and eventually got into the hands of a guy named Griffith Jenkins Griffith a Welsh immigrant who made his fortune in mining Griffith J Griffith donated three thousand fifteen acres of his Rancho Los Feliz to the city in 1896 Griffith wanted the land to become a place of recreation for all of Los Angeles to enjoy it was a democratic vision but how would the city inscribe Griffiths vision in the landscape le an undeveloped those 3,000 acres were a blank slate so a park can be a lot of things right it can be Pershing Square or Yosemite right and obviously the idea of a park has changed a lot over time it's constantly evolving 1896 when Griffith donates the land of the city what's his vision for the park so yeah at that time a lot of the parks especially in the states were very manicured their landscape they're sort of that English style garden and Griffith kind of had a vision for both of those things in Griffith Park he wanted some of those developed areas for things like playgrounds golf courses that sort of thing but he also wanted to make sure that the natural playground of a shop roll was still preserved in its sort of rugged State well he really accomplished that still today over 100 years later the park is still pretty much like that we've got that rugged landscape that can support mountain lions and then we've also got things like what we're about to go see [Music] there's no substitute for a live horse but the mechanical steeds of Griffith parks merry-go-round have been trotting in circles since 1935 it was here that Walt Disney sat on a bench watched his daughters ride the carousel and dreamed up a Magic Kingdom that parents and children could enjoy together but Casey and I didn't ride here to discuss Disneyland instead we met up with historian Alison Rose Jefferson to learn about an event that took place here on Memorial Day 1961 a civil disturbance that challenged the notion that Griffiths Park was for everyone Memorial Day in 1961 and it was it was a situation that was some African American kids who had come to enjoy themselves on that particular day here at the merry-go-round and they were jumping on and off and skipping out from pain and the proprietors were some white guys and they weren't so happy about them skipping out in pain so then the proprietors called the police and this is during a time when we had chief Parker and his police and chief Parker at the time was very antagonistic towards the african-american community it was a busy day here at the park and when the police got here they had an altercation with the crowd because they were calling people names they were using racial slurs and they use that in word and and the young people kind of got a little upset and then basically shut down the park didn't eat and they shut down the park there were more african-americans coming to use the park as well as mexican-americans and the people that were running the concession here were feeling a little overwhelmed I think that day it was the time of the Freedom Rides as well where the folks in Montgomery Alabama who were down there to protest segregation and discrimination had been attacked so the social context of the time was all over the nation young people involved in expressing themselves in terms of various kinds of civil rights and and taking advantage of the various opportunities that were available to them in fact the young men who hopped on and off the carousel explicitly invoked that political context equipping that they were Freedom Riders that explains why bystanders rushed to their defense when police arrived the crowd grew angry and chanted this is an Alabama and the kids got accused and arrested and wound up having to spend a little time in County Jail so that just shows the attitude of trying to vilify these young men so this event 1961 the the melee or the riot or the protester whatever label you you put on it it really sort of challenged the the notion that Griffith Park was for everybody right there was a new sense of what the civil rights struggle was about during that time and I think the kids who were participating in the melee we're just kind of feeling their oats as young people here in Los Angeles and that's something that has carried over from earlier years of the parks development even though there were these rights struggles that were here and the melee situation that happened african-americans had been using the park earlier for golf for picnics and I guess it all kind of leads to the present day when sort of these picnic grounds right around the merry-go-round this where people from all different backgrounds in LA kind of meet and share the space yeah that was all sort of in the spirit of what griffith intended for this place although the merry-go-round has been a social and political flashpoint it remains a park favorite and fun as ever [Music] so the carousel looks like a carefree place for children but there's been a lot of serious political protests here right so this is kind of always been a melting pot area for the park which leads to a lot of protests and events one of the first love ends was here the first gay in was here as well as well as kind of in the mid late sixties a lot of biker rallies that cause some extra work for the LAPD [Music] [Music] so there's really so much history here in Griffith Park and so many layers you could probably point at any place here and there's a story right so we were just down where the the Autry in the zoo are right now and that used to be what was known as the Griffith reservation which was kind of land that Griffith had preserved for himself until after he died and then it would be kind of reverted back to the park that eventually became the Griffith Park airfield which then was like a quasi-military use because the National Guard was there yeah and then the military used it for housing of veterans how long during the World War two yeah Wow or quite some time actually longer than anyone expected them to was one of the first integrated housing units in Los Angeles as well until around the 1950s when you know anyone paying for anything became communism so they decided to kind of bulldoze the whole village kick everybody out even though they were veterans who were living there that's when the freeways came in as well so there you go there's a story for every acre here story for everything and rebellion all right like we've said there's so many stories in Griffith Park and really the guy who tells them the best is Mikey Bert's his book Griffith Park a centennial history is the best history that's been written about this park [Music] I might make the masters oh hey thanks for meeting us here again yeah good to see you Jeff so there are all these theories well now why Griffith donated the land of the city what's your take on that well he was a public spirited guy probably just about from the time he came to Los Angeles he had sold the city some water rights along the LA River for well below market cost and this is something the city really needed because the LA River was was the city's lifeline back then sure he also had done other good works like he had offered homesteads to to journalists he had made some overtures about giving some land for a park but this was his you know by far his biggest gift so I think it's fair to say the Griffith had a charitable streak but his reputation was probably forever tarnished by what happened later September 1903 Griffiths behavior is a little weird his wife suggests that they take a vacation and they go to Santa Monica the hotel staff later reported that his his behavior was strange he would insist on switching the plates and saucers because he was afraid that somebody was trying to deploy z'n him perhaps the Pope but he was variably anti-catholic yes yes he was and it was hardwired into him very young where and when Griffith grew up there was a virulent anti-catholicism and unfortunately he brought that across the ocean with Griffith at his height was drinking perhaps two quarts of whiskey a day Wow it's the last day of the vacation Tina colonel Griffiths wife is addressing some postcards and Griffith comes into the room with her prayer book in one hand and his revolver in the other he hands her the prayer book and he starts reading her questions off of a menu card he's got the revolver on her and the questions were did she have something to do with the death of the family friend whose property she inherited was she now slowly poisoning him a third one was had she always been faithful to him and he didn't get the fourth question he fired the shot instead of hitting her dead center it took her eye out but she lived and she survived the defense developed the theory that Griffith had a jekyll-and-hyde personality that Griffith was not just drunk but crazy drunk Griffith got off with two years in prison which most people around town thought was absurdly light absolutely two years in prison yeah the record is that Griffith did not ask for special favors the word is that when he got out he had gotten a handle on on his alcoholism and he was a lot saner yeah what's interesting is like he came out of prison with a really strong desire to work hard to get back to his station in life that's when he wrote his book about the park philosophy he donated money for the Greek Theatre and the observatory he died about in the 1920s in 1919 1919 what was his reputation upon his death I think the city was used to having him back I think he was still a flawed figure the building of the observatory had been delayed and there's the feeling that the parks department kind of delayed until ripples out of the way and there were also movements around that time probably I'm not sure if it was after before his death but there was a movement to rename Griffith Park because his name was solely but it's in the deed that it has to be Griffith I didn't do it but they did rename Griffith peak which is now not Hollywood right thank you very much yeah yeah thanks mate so la really is fortunate to have such a huge municipal park up here at the tail end of the Santa Monica Mountains but the scale of this place really does remind you just how Park poor the rest of LA is or most of my way so the trust republic land every year does this thing called the park score index where they rank America's 100 biggest cities in terms of Park equity Park quality Park access an LA usually ranks in the bottom third which is pretty bad considering how much money we have but you know you come up to a place like River Park and it's really incredible it is it kind of gives you an idea of what we could have if we had more people with the foresight of Griffith J Griffith more people who took care of the park afterward and extended this network out into the city challenge I guess now is how do you better connect the park here to the rest of the city right that's who the park really is for and right Griffith Park is for Angelenos and it's for everybody yeah and it's when you look out at LA from an angle like this you can see how many Angelenos there are and how few of them can easily get into Griffith Park but and they're all around they're all around yeah they're behind there they're everywhere and you know here we are 120 years later and we're still trying to figure out how we make this park accessible for everybody yeah well it's working progress it's a work in progress and it is it's still it's a beautiful thing and you know for all but shortcomings Griffith Park is an incredible and amazing place in LA and for my money it's one of the best city parks in the entire country [Music] okay should we start talking or so let's wait for Casey there we go so you've been working on your book [Music] Mikey birds horses horses don't want to move this way lost la is made possible in part by a grant from an r/a foundation a Margaret a Cargill philanthropy the Ralph M Parsons foundation and the California State Library

Channel: PBS SoCal

Views: 252,364

Keywords: kcet, southern california, Lost LA, Nathan Masters, Griffith Park, Griffith J. Griffith, history, Los Angeles

Id: QVRWeCv1BiA

Length: 26min 48sec (1608 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 16 2019