Griffith Observatory | The Valley Village View

“Not half as old as I feel, darling.”

Enjoy this treasury of photographs showcasing the geology, botany, and fascinating social history of LA’s greatest park, now celebrating its 125th birthday.

My favorite picture ever, I think. A bride escorted by her dad up Fern Dell. I had just passed the wedding party and officiant at the top of the trail, nicely kitted out, waiting in excitement. The bride was grimacing with fright as she caught the light. What a spot for a wedding! What a spot for anything.

The rancho adobe (in some form, since 1795!) was preserved as Park Ranger HQ.

This unbelievabvly rich land was Rancho Los Feliz — “the Felizes’,” the first (or second) rancho grant in California. It was granted as a reward to a retiring military intendente of Los Angeles. The Pueblo was successfully settled and competent, the Tongva successfully relocated to San Gabriel, and happy Mexican farmers were churning out grain in the vast riverbed. Griffith J. Griffith bought the rancho from Yankee speculators for a song, and when he offered it to the City, with his grand visions of civic adornment and classical education and human uplift and ecological connection — he practically had to beg the City to take it. They were afraid to take Griffith’s gift, thousands of untouched watershed acres, because Griffith personally, had problems… it turns out, he shot his wife in the face, in a hotel room on Santa Monica Beach. The City Fathers were afraid the voters’ wives’ ministers’ wives would reject the City Council socially, if they shook hands with a beast like Griffith. He did two years in Q.

This photo is from the California Department of Corrections online article about Q’s famous alumnus, which tells the whole lurid story! Click, Baited Reader, click….

https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/insidecdcr/2019/05/23/unlocking-history-las-griffith-park-observatory-bear-name-of-early-1900s-san-quentin-inmate/

It took decades before Victorian propriety thinned out enough for the City to take possession, and it took decades more (1930!) for them to get around to building the Observatory and the Greek Theatre; both were stipulated in the conveyance. The delay was a good thing too, architecturally, for the Observatory — by then, the grace of Art Deco had come in to soften the Greek of Griffith’s preference, and the Federal Fascism that looked forward to Roosevelt’s New Deal; and it could all coalesce with modern engineering. It is one of the most iconic buildings on planet Earth (which it turns out is where we are; go inside and they’ll explain.)

The Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round. Since we’re nosing into the Holidays anyway (Sinter Klaas, Dec. 5), and there’s apparently no other footage anywhere of the Merry-Go-Round, and the **dead operator** who loved and maintained this instrument for years can be seen in the video in his Sinter Klaas cap, here is **Jolly Old St. Nicholas**, with bells and whistles, and the moose bugling along. Enjoy the View Walt Disney had, a bench in the Park, watching his Merry- kids -Go -Round, and see if you dream up anything as lucrative as *Disneyland*, like he did. *Dream harder…*

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PqOmMc9dStEtvi2b-GYdFhgiXTlYQ_SK/view?usp=drivesdk

**“Griffith Park is 125. It looked 125 five years ago. It will look it twenty years from now. I hate parks.”**

Atop Mt. Hollywood, at 1,134 feet above the briny blue, Griffith Observatory is a high-point of public life of LA. The cost to any citizen or tourist, a mere $2.25 (Metro fare to Vermont/Sunset + .50c for the short DASH Observatory Shuttle; or park at the Greek Theatre and DASH up). It is a foolish Angel who doesn’t take Hawk Perspective from this spot from time to time. Especially when the day’s sunset looks to be fine, when the President is being impeached, or it’s the last day of the hottest September on Record.

The View to Mt. Lee, home of the Hollywood Sign, which is 1,709 ft. above the mean line of the Venice surf.

“Griffith Observatory is a free-admission, public facility owned and operated by the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks in the middle of an urban metropolis of ten million people. The Observatory is one of the most popular informal education facilities in the United States and the most-visited public observatory in the world (with 1.5 million visitors a year). Griffith Observatory is a unique hybrid of public observatory, planetarium, and exhibition space. It was constructed with funds from the bequest of Griffith J. Griffith (who donated the land for Griffith Park in 1896), who specified the purpose, features, and location of the building in his 1919 will. Upon completion of construction in 1935, the Observatory was given to the City of Los Angeles with the provision that it be operated for the public with no admission charge. When it opened in 1935, it was one of the first institutions in the U.S. dedicated to public science and possessed the third planetarium in the U.S.
Fulfilling the Observatory’s goal of “visitor as observer,” free public telescope viewing is available each evening skies are clear and the building is open. More people (8 million) have looked through the Observatory’s Zeiss 12-inch refracting telescope than through any other on Earth. More than 17 million have seen a live program in the Observatory’s Samuel Oschin Planetarium.”
— Griffith Observatory website