Prairie S.
Yelp
Very few people know that Mr. Griffith was a wife abuser, and that the dedication of his lands as public parks to the City of LA as well as the construction of his eponymous Observatory were done as a kind of bribe to salvage his criminal reputation from the time he was jailed for shooting his wife in the face. (She lived to see another day.)
He's far from the only ignoble rich white man behind much of the City's history. However, the 4000+ acre, hilly, natural lands today are a wonderful escape from the central Los Angeles basin notable only for its rude dearth of nature. Block after block of concrete was poured over any available open space--no mitigation for public squares, aesthetic beauty, or nature amenities, nor passing thought for ecological balance. That is the logic of greedy capitalist, imperialist mindsets. Commerce without regard for the source of life, take without limits.
I was fortunate enough to live within walking distance of the back entrance along Commonwealth Avenue which is one of the quieter access routes, and had routine scrabbles up a back hill to the "grove" of Cedar trees that gives a vague sense of a square-inch-island of forest amidst the ocean of concrete.
What's remarkable is that since the park is largely at height, it affords you remove from the hustle of the city, a genuine sense of escape. As well, the vistas looking out of the river to the east, the downtown skyscrapers to the south, and the grand sky shows are impressive. The moon rises to the east behind Glendale are stunning and to the west, sunsets over the distant Pacific are also epic.
In Los Angeles though, commercialism does trump nature. This park is too valuable not be used as a film or photography backdrop. So my walks at night would periodically be interrupted by blinding levels of camera lighting that required heavy machinery/cranes to set up, and the entire hill side might be lit up like a neighborhood to shoot an ad or TV/film scene. Throughout the history of this city's cinematic production history, Griffith Park has been cast as Texas, Missouri, or any western scene, railroad, "battle with indians" and the whole fake mythology of white America.
Image always trumps the earthly truths in Los Angeles. Yet occasionally the reality of cinema meets earth as well-- on one of my walks through the park, I recognized the King of Hollywood, Brad Pitt himself, and he kindly obliged me with a photo for the family and friends.
One of the best secrets in the city is the fantastic DASH circulator bus that takes one up from the Vermont Avenue approach, and allows you to get off at the Observatory from where hikes to Mount Hollywood and other interwoven trails are a pinch to access.
Once you know the back scrabble routes, you'll see signals of California's authentic ecology: there are clumps of native wildflowers in the spring after the rains. One always has a sense of wildness in proximity: bird calls are a reminder that this is their habitat and coyotes are able to roam freely.
Most of the park is brown and overgrown with invasive species for much of the 9 months during which Los Angeles is arid. It's annoyingly hot and dry.
But the value of nature--left undeveloped-- seems only to increase with each passing year as the consequences of pitiless, ugly, and rectilinear urban sprawl of California's aggressive capitalism demonstrate its ravages. The land has been choked, the skies are murky, years-long drought is the norm, temperatures are too high in the urban megalopolis, the people are left aggressive, survivalist, and poor with medieval disease outbreaks, and southern California is a Frankenstein monster compared to before the invasion of 1848.
Leave Griffith Park alone.
