100-Year Birthday Celebration : Elysian Park--They Tip Their Hats to a Survivor

For a 100-year-old Los Angeles native who has fought off hot-rodders, forest fires, murderers and real estate men, Elysian Park is looking pretty good.

Although it was on April 5, 1886, that the City Council set aside the 585 rolling acres as parkland, the 100-year birthday celebration began on Friday, with an Arbor Day gathering that unveiled a new park sign, and added four trees to the sylvan site.

The park has survived the ravages of a 1981 fire and killings in its Lovers’ Lane and, with human help, has fended off a convention center, condominiums, oil drilling, classrooms and an airport. Today, its quiet green wilderness echoes to the crack of pistol fire from the Police Academy, or the smack of a base hit at Dodger Stadium.

Friday’s fog bank that stretched from Mexico to Oregon--”another first for Los Angeles Beautiful,” joked emcee Raymond Ziegler, president of the beautification group--was a suitable setting for the guest of honor: Gaspar the friendly ghost.

The image of Gaspar de Portola, a Spanish captain and the first non-Indian to set foot on the site, strode forth, shouting “Ole!” and trying to sheathe his rapier, muttering about his “muchas dificultades” in doing so.

Clad in brown quilted tabard and high boots (where he stashed his car keys, since the costume had no pockets), Portola--actually, LA Beautiful past president William Esherich--welcomed the dignitaries to the site he first found overgrown with roses and wild grapes.

“This place means so much to me that I’ve come back every 50 years or so,” Portola/Esherich told the crowd. “Unfortunately, I find other things as well in these beautiful surroundings,” he said severely. Dragging out a brown paper sack, he hauled out: an empty Budweiser can; “Dor- ee -tos,” he said, waving the snack chips; “Pollo Loco . . . Snickers!”

“What are these things?” he said with contempt.

The moral was not lost on the crowd of about 70. Many there Friday belong to the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park, whose newest defense is against a proposed seven-acre aluminum roof on the park’s water reservoir.

“Thank you, Gas,” said Ziegler, as Portola stalked off into the mists of history--and the parking lot.

Later in the program, Portola and other guests--including Spunky Squirrel, a furry, six-foot national symbol of urban forestry (and, for the day, county fire suppression aide Irvin Oler, the only man who fit into the costume), unveiled--or deflowered--a new redwood sign for the park entrance.

They jointly pulled from the sign a 5-by-8-foot blanket of chrysanthemums, a floral canvas made by eight Lincoln High School horticulture students. The students stayed up until midnight Thursday, gluing the posies into a mosaic pattern showing birds of paradise, the city flower.

After unfurling a nylon Tree City USA flag--the first such designation for Los Angeles, where the tops of pine trees grow at 90-degree angles to duck the smog--dignitaries shoveled earth around the roots of four young crape myrtle trees, as a gopher dodged dirt clods.

Watching it all was park ranger David Feliz, whose four-times-great-grandfather, Jose Vicente Feliz, had been given a big chunk of nearby land by the king of Spain two centuries ago. Today, Feliz patrols the hills of what is now Griffith Park, an employee on land his family once owned.

He is not much bothered by the family fate. “I still get to enjoy it,” he philosophized, “and everyone else is paying the taxes on it.”