Griffith Park: The Guilt Bequest and the Cursed Land

The four-thousand-acre mountain park on your right is the largest municipal park with urban wilderness area in the United States, and the story of how it came to be is one of the more complicated gift stories in American civic history.

The land belonged to Griffith Jenkins Griffith, a Welsh immigrant who came to California in the eighteen sixties, made a fortune in mining and real estate, and purchased a large portion of the old Rancho Los Feliz for himself. On December sixteenth, eighteen ninety-six, in what was described at the time as a Christmas gift to the people of Los Angeles, Griffith donated three thousand fifteen acres to the city. The city accepted.

Seven years later, in nineteen oh three, Griffith shot his wife in the face at a Santa Monica hotel, believing she was conspiring with the Pope to poison him. He was charged with assault with intent to commit murder but, after his attorney argued alcoholic insanity, was convicted on the lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon and served about two years in San Quentin. He emerged from prison still a wealthy man, and in his will he left one hundred thousand dollars to build an observatory, a Greek theatre, and other public improvements on his donated land. The city was reluctant to accept the money from a convicted criminal and delayed for years. Both projects were eventually built after his death: the Greek Theatre opened in nineteen thirty, and Griffith Observatory opened on May fourteenth, nineteen thirty-five, as the third planetarium completed in the United States.

The observatory became famous far beyond Los Angeles. James Dean filmed the climactic scenes of Rebel Without a Cause here in nineteen fifty-five. It appeared in La La Land and dozens of other films. On clear nights the public telescopes reveal Saturn's rings to anyone willing to wait in line.

Where Griffith's motives ended and his guilt began is a question the park does not answer. But four thousand acres of accessible mountains in the middle of Los Angeles is what his complicated legacy looks like from the outside.