Discovering Griffith Park. Casey Schreiner

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       Griffith Park: An Introduction

      Although it’s often compared to places like New York’s Central Park or San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Griffith Park is its own unique, very L.A. thing. First, it dwarfs those other famous parks—it’s more than four times the size of Golden Gate and five times the size of Central Park. At over 4300 acres, Griffith Park is one of the largest municipal parks in North America.

      Griffith is also much more rugged and wild than Golden Gate or Central. Located in the easternmost part of the Santa Monica Mountains, Griffith Park is home to rare chaparral, sage scrub, and oak woodlands with unique, endemic species of plants and animals—and a famous mountain lion, too. And it has all of that while also offering up more traditional developed park amenities like golf courses, a zoo, and an observatory you’ve definitely seen in the movies. Oh yeah, and there’s a big sign you’ve probably seen before, too.

      The park turns 125 years old in 2021 and gets more annual visitors than most national parks (over 12 million a year at last count!), but the book you’re holding right now is the first in-depth guidebook written about it. Beyond all that, Griffith Park deserves its own book because it’s weird, it’s messy, it’s complex, and it’s wonderful. Incredible stories have happened here—and incredible things will happen here in the future.

      This is not a completely comprehensive look at every nook and cranny of the park, nor is it an attempt to tell every tale within its borders. But you can consider this book a sort of “pocket visitor center” for the park. It’s a way to make sense of the park depending on what you’re looking to do and how you want to get around, and it will give you a sense of the park’s history and place in Los Angeles. The park’s major museums and attractions are described here as well as the unique gardens and monuments that have been special places for Angelenos and visitors for generations.

      The book also details different uses for the park, including picnicking, cycling, horseback riding, and more, and provides maps that help you focus on the activities you want to enjoy.

      Of course, there’s also hiking here: I highlight thirty-three different routes in and around the park, from gentle walks you can do with a stroller to tough full-day adventures that will leave you exhausted and exhilarated.

      And don’t worry—I’ve got some good spots for Hollywood Sign selfies, too.

       A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LAND

      Although the story of Griffith Park is often told in the scope of the timeline of the guy the park is named after, it should go without saying that the land that comprises Griffith Park existed long before Griffith J. Griffith set foot in the region.

      The people who are today broadly known as the Tongva-Gabrielino (both the name and the spelling may vary) have thousands of years of history in Los Angeles County. Before Europeans arrived, this landscape would have looked significantly different—no manicured picnic areas or golf courses, but dense old-growth oak woodlands and sage scrub that supported large animals like grizzly bears. The Los Angeles River had no concrete boundaries, and it changed courses and directions often with the floodwaters and supported large fish like steelhead trout. And of course, the city’s ubiquitous freeways weren’t here—but you could still find travelers and traders tracing the future route of the 101 in the land known as Tovaangar, with villages stretching from present-day Santa Clarita to Palos Verdes and inland to the San Gabriel Mountains, western San Bernardino Valley, and Santiago Peak in northern Orange County.

      Many findings are very new, but scholars now believe there were at least three Tongva-Gabrielino settlements in the vicinity of Griffith Park—one near Fern Dell, one west of Travel Town near Universal City, and one near where the Los Feliz adobe and ranger station are today.

      The histories of the original inhabitants of this land—like many throughout the Americas—sadly were forgotten or actively erased by those who came later, but the descendants of those original people still live here. Indeed, Los Angeles is the city with the second-highest number of Native American citizens in the country, and thankfully there is a renewed interest and attempt to preserve and tell their stories. The Autry Museum inside Griffith Park continues to break new ground in bringing these histories back to life with a combination of scholarly research and personal outreach to modern Tongva-Gabrielino representatives.

      The first known recorded instances of Europeans inside Griffith Park came with Juan Bautista de Anza’s 1775–76 expedition to establish an overland route from Sonora, Mexico, to Monterey, then the capital of Alta California. СКАЧАТЬ