Happy 100th Birthday to the ‘Resort for the Rank and File of the Plain People.’ : With That, Col. Griffith J. Griffith Donated the Land That Would Became Griffith Park. So How Has Our Urban ‘Resort’ Aged Over the Last 100 Years? Considering All That’s Happened, Pretty Gracefully.

“YA HA! . . . YA HO!” One voice, then another and another rise in salutation from the summit. “Alleluia. Alleluia,” proclaims a woman in flowing white robes, kneeling, her hands opened toward the rising sun.

With shouts, prayers and hymns, Sae-Ook Song and members of his Griffith Park Alpine Hiking Club greet the dawn from atop Mt. Hollywood. One by one, several families of coyotes pipe up, rousting birds and other inhabitants with their screwball reveille. A red-tailed hawk launches itself over Dante’s View, a palm and eucalyptus grove on the path to the mountaintop. Bursts of magenta streak across a hundred miles of winter sky, lighting up the horizon from the San Bernardino Mountains to Santa Barbara Island.

Down the mountain, one of the park’s dozen or so human residents, a man known as Gunnar, emerges from a tent hidden deep in a thicket to bathe in a makeshift spa, its erratic water supply fed by condensation from the Griffith Observatory’s heating and air-conditioning system.

Half a mile below, in still-dark Western Canyon, senior gardener Hector Rivera, assembles his work force: 135 general relief recipients. Indigent men and women have been working in the park since the Depression, building roads and trails, pruning trees and painting out graffiti. In 1933, 30 of them died here fighting one of the most lethal fires in the city’s history. Today, one young Latino, Balbino Moz, proudly announces in broken English that Rivera has chosen him to repaint one of the park’s most familiar monuments: the Hollywood sign.

With dawn’s first light, golfers are beginning to tee up at the park’s four courses. (Even at this hour, reservations are recommended.) Bicycle and horseback riders are out. Beth Horne is often among them, doing her best to keep her 5-year-old roan, Rose, on an even keel. On mountain trails reserved for horses and hikers, Horne has encountered cars, motorcycles, nude joggers and, once, a man playing bagpipes.

Members of a cross-country track team from John Marshall High School are warming up in a parking lot on Zoo Drive. Nearby, a crew from Warner Brothers is dismantling an elaborate movie set, a re-creation of the Bronx Zoo built for “Eraser,” a thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. (From “The Birth of a Nation” to “King Kong,” from “Rebel Without a Cause” to “Batman,” hundreds of feature films, documentaries and commercials have been shot in the park.)

At 6 a.m., animal keeper Laurie Ahlander has taken her place behind a wall of 23 video monitors to watch for signs of serious courtship among the 42 California condors that are part of the captive breeding program of the Los Angeles Zoo, home to about 40% of the world’s endangered condor population.

Griffith Park, the city’s emerald isle in a sea of stucco and concrete, turns 100 this year. Though larger and a little worse for the wear since its creation, the park has not changed in at least one important respect. Col. Griffith J. Griffith, the man who donated the land in 1896, wanted it to be “a resort for the rank and file of the plain people.” Part visionary and part blowhard, Griffith was a bizarre figure, his career ultimately destroyed by a scandalous shooting. A tireless booster of Los Angeles, Griffith predicted that the city would become a huge metropolis, and its civic health would be dependent on a park of commensurate size. “Public parks are a safety valve of great cities,” Griffith wrote, “and should be made accessible and attractive, where neither race, creed nor color should be excluded.”

Today, city officials estimate that the number of annual visitors to the park approaches 10 million. That figure includes repeaters, but it surpasses the number of yearly visits to almost all U.S. national parks. By the early 1920s, the park’s first golf course was attracting so many players that officials briefly considered prohibiting non-citiizens from the links. But the city council quickly jettisoned that proposal, and the park’s contemporary blend of cultures, from Korean American hiking clubs to Latino bands and gay and black rodeos, clearly lives up to Griffith’s dream of a democratic playground.

*

A rumpled quilt of low granite mountains, steep canyons, playing fields, golf courses, aeries and grottoes, Griffith Park is five times as large as New York City’s Central Park. Occupying the easternmost flank of the Santa Monica Mountains, on lands once inhabited by Gabrielino Indians, the park extends from Hollywood to Glendale and from Burbank to Los Feliz. It stretches over five square miles and is the home of many of the city’s most venerable cultural and recreational attractions, including the observatory, the zoo, the city’s Equestrian Center, the Greek Theatre, the Autry Museum of Western Heritage and the Travel Town railroad and museum.

It has also been home to things that don’t belong in a park: an airfield, a dump, a prison farm, a World War II prisoner-of-war camp and a postwar GI housing complex.

The park has been ravaged by floods, earthquakes and fire. Thousands of eucalyptuses, pines and redwoods died during the recent drought. Most have not been replaced. About 35% of the park’s acreage had gone up in flames by 1970, according to Mike Eberts, a Glendale College journalism professor whose book, “Griffith Park: A Centennial History” is scheduled to be published in June by the Historical Society of Southern California.

An urban park, it has not remained immune from the forces buffeting the rest of the city. Dead bodies turn up periodically; the victims of five unrelated murders and suicides were found in the space of one month a few years ago. There have been racial melees. Vandalism and theft is epidemic; lately, there has been a run on brass restroom fixtures. Last summer, rival gangs began facing off in a parking lot in Fern Dell, a long, leafy arcade that has always been a favorite destination for strollers and picnickers. By year’s end, police had made more than 100 arrests for lewd conduct. It was not a record.

In 1992, on one of the park’s saddest days, Stanley Diamond, the beloved engineer of Travel Town’s children’s train, was shot to death during a robbery of the train’s cash box.

There’s even a curse. In the 1860s, when the park was part of the 6,600-acre Rancho Los Feliz, an heir to the rancho, one Petranilla Feliz, was cheated out of her inheritance. According to the legend, she put a curse on the land, warning that nothing and no one would ever prosper there again.

In a way, municipal parks have always been cursed. Over-used and under-financed, they reflect America’s ambivalence toward public spaces. This is especially true in the West, where cities abut mountain ranges and seashores, and man-made parks can seem almost superfluous.

People elsewhere have rallied to the defense of aging city parks. In the midst of New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s, civic activists created a conservancy and raised more than $100 million for the rehabilitation of Central Park, which turned 100 years old in 1976. The conservancy continues to play an important role in the affairs of the park, actually paying the salaries of most park employees, including landscapers and horticulturalists that the city could not previously afford.

In the shadow of the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains, in a recreation-obsessed metropolis that boasts of Disneyland, Universal City and miles of beaches, Griffith Park is easily ignored. Moreover, as part of the first truly suburban city, the park competes for people’s attention--and for water--with some of the most breathtaking and exotic backyards in urban America.

One hundred years ago, Griffith Park lay just beyond the city limits. Today, it lies near the same city’s tired heart. And like the rest of Los Angeles, it is counting on new blood to revive dwindling budgets and sagging civic spirits. From the soccer fields and picnic areas to the trails up Mt. Hollywood, the most accessible parts of the park have never been more popular. Yet, as the traditional middle class has dispersed, moving west and north or out of the region altogether, the old sources of philanthropy and environmental activism have been drying up.

From the beginning, officialdom has not known quite what to do with Griffith Park. When the land for it was first offered to the city, the mayor and the city council took two years making up their minds whether to accept it. The park’s first master plan in 1939 stressed the park’s wilderness value, while the next one in 1968 hyped it as a theme park. The following year, the director of city planning was discouraging further preservation of the park’s natural resources. Why bother, he said, with so much wilderness within easy driving distance of Los Angeles.

Today, the park’s reigning symbol of volunteerism, 91-year-old Charlie Turner, can no longer make it on his own to Dante’s View, the oasis of trees and plants on the east slope of Mt. Hollywood that he has tended for more than 30 years. Arriving by pickup truck atop the 1,600 foot mountain, Turner was the guest of honor recently at the first of several planned centennial festivities. Clutching a cane and speaking softly of the years he has spent looking after the park, Turner helped remind people of how much the place depends on the goodwill and sweat equity of ordinary citizens.

As the park heads into its second century, it will have $50 million in voter-approved bond proceeds to make needed improvements at the zoo and the observatory. (Park Superintendent George Stigile has formally proposed raising additional revenue by establishing a recreational-vehicle park in the zoo’s parking lot, though the project has been put on hold.)

But from a Recreation and Parks Department budget of $91 million, less than $3 million is available for the upkeep of the park’s natural areas. The budget includes virtually no money to rehabilitate eroded portions of the park’s 52-mile trail system, to repair the broken-down irrigation system or to fix the leaky 40-year-old water tanks that are the park’s first line of defense against fire.

No one has ever conducted an inventory of wildlife in the park, and there is no money to buy adjacent land that would extend wildlife corridors to other natural habitats in the city. Travel Town’s unique collection of classic steam engines rusts and rots in the open air while devotees of the place search for funds to build a shelter.

The park’s nursery, an acre of greenhouses that was built in the 1930s and for years produced plants and flowers for all of the parks in the city, lies fallow now. The skeletal remains of its glass-and-lathe growing sheds are a legacy of Proposition 13 budget cuts. So, is the eight-member park ranger staff, half the size it was 10 years ago, although in the past, the rangers’ assignments at times took them outside the park.

“As popular as it is, I don’t think the park has ever had a strong, organized constituency sticking up for its natural assets,” says Tom LaBonge, the mayor’s office’s emissary to the park. “The zoo has a voluntary fund-raising arm. The observatory has one. But the park itself does not.”

Instead, the park has had to rely on individuals, on volunteer caretakers like Charlie Turner and LaBonge himself who helps Turner keep up his garden on Mt. Hollywood. And among the park’s professional staff are people like gardener Rivera who go about their duties with an anxious, almost-parental affection. Another such person is Park Ranger Rupert Margetson.

Margetson is the only full-time, legal resident of the park. He has been there for six years, living alone in an adobe cottage in Fern Dell that, when the park’s budget allowed for such things, housed a nature museum until the early 1980s.

He has seen a lot since he moved in. Some of it he would just as soon forget--the bodies, in particular. He found one suicide victim hanging from a branch in Cedar Grove, and another, with a bullet hole in his brow, in the notch of a sequoia tree across the street from his house.

The park ranger considers it a good day when he has not been roused from his sleep at 2 a.m. by gunfire in a nearby parking lot, when a despondent runaway teenager has not knocked on his door in the middle of the night, or when a beat-up prostitute hasn’t asked him for a ride to the emergency room.

A Massachusetts native who worked in the court system most of his adult life, Margetson yearned for an outdoor job. But aside from the morning run he takes every day with his dog, Boston, he doesn’t have much time to enjoy his natural surroundings.

Margetson patrols the whole park from his Fern Dell base near Western Avenue and Los Feliz Boulevard, where the park and the inner city rub elbows. With its winding pathways, quaint foot bridges, terraced pools and rock gardens, Fern Dell is a sort of extended arbor. It is bordered by one of the more long-established and inviting residential neighborhoods adjacent to the park. But Fern Dell also is just around the bend from ramshackle East Hollywood and its plague of prostitutes, panhandlers, drug pushers and gang bangers. They like the park, too.

“Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t keep them out,” Margetson says. “Not with one unarmed park ranger who is expected to be part caretaker, part social worker, part cop and full-time night watchman.”

So, Margetson operates by what he calls “Rupert’s Rules”--a flexible set of guidelines that reflect Col. Griffith’s founding wish that the park was to be a refuge for “plain people.”

“Rupert’s Rules means you can set up camp in the park if you keep your tent out of sight, don’t start any fires, don’t hassle the neighbors and don’t make trouble for the other (homeless) guys.”

He also expects the park denizens to do odd jobs, report to him when serious trouble is afoot and disappear when visitors want to make use of the picnic area where the homeless men like to hold court.

The park’s homeless population waxes and wanes with the seasons. From two or three dozen people, their numbers dwindle to less than 10 in the winter. Park rangers say that one or two of them have been living in the park off and on for 20 years.

Margetson calls these veterans “the boys” and tolerates their drinking and a certain amount of unruliness. When two of them got into a drunken fistfight just before Christmas, it was grounds for expulsion from the park. But Margetson wrote it off to the holiday blues and let the two men be.

“I can’t think of these guys without thinking of my brother who died homeless when he was 30,” says Margetson who is in his mid-40s. “These guys are someone’s sons or brothers and ought to be treated with respect.”

Thirty-six-year-old Gunnar is one of the boys. He says he has been living in Griffith Park for about six months, working at odd jobs during the day, taking his meals at nearby missions but spending most of the time in the park.

Bivouacked in the recesses of Western Canyon above Fern Dell, Wiberg says he has found a temporary refuge from a life of addiction that cost him his job and landed him in prison for vehicular homicide. “This is nature’s detox up here. No crack dealers, no drive-bys. Just God’s handiwork--birds, squirrels and coyotes. Worst thing that can happen to you is a black widow or a rattlesnake, and I haven’t had any trouble with them yet.”

One day, Gunnar says, he will fold his tent and take another stab at a normal life in the city. In the meantime, he depends on the good graces of ranger Rupert.

“Without Rupert, man, we (the park’s homeless community) wouldn’t have a friend.”

The owners of homes abutting Fern Dell also think highly of Margetson, and most approve of his efforts on behalf of the homeless. (One of the neighbors has gone so far as to let a senior member of the Fern Dell homeless corps camp in his front yard.) At the same time, the neighbors are pressuring City Hall to restrict access to Fern Dell with a gate that would block car traffic from entering the area after dark. “It’s not the homeless we’re worried about so much as the gang bangers and the cruisers,” says David Rambo, a real estate agent who has lived in the neighborhood for several years. “The gunshots in the parking lot, the vandalism to our property, the lewd conduct--that’s what we think we can cut down on if we can keep cars from coming in here at night.”

Yet, there is something in the nature of an urban wilderness that has always made Griffith Park a mecca of forbidden pleasure and illicit activity, as Mike Eberts points out in his forthcoming book.

One fall night in 1925, writes Eberts, the park’s foreman “came across two women--intoxicated, lost and naked--wandering the trails. A short time later,” the foreman told The Times, “he found a party of four, on horseback and also naked.” Five years later, the park superintendent told the Park Board that drinking and carousing in Griffith Park was out of control.

During the Prohibition years, a police vice squad discovered 100 gallons of wine, whiskey and cognac that had been stashed in an adobe shed by an enterprising city employee who had set up an unofficial 19th hole to cater to thirsty golfers.

In the 1960s, the counter culture staked out the park. As elsewhere, the era opened peacefully with impromptu concerts and love-ins. Later, hard drugs started to show up, along with motorcycle gangs and more and more police. Seventy-eight arrests were made on one weekend in November 1967, 38 on another. For a while, families shunned the park on Sunday afternoons.

A decade later, several park roads became favorite haunts of men cruising for sex partners. Trysting in the chaparral--and not always very far into the brush--became commonplace.

“Griffith Park is the capital of the sexual underground,” wrote John Rechy in his 1977 book, “The Sexual Outlaw,” about gay hustlers in Los Angeles. The park presented “miles of sex- hunting along declining paths, hills to the sides of the road. When, on very hot days, the area is closed to cars because of fire hazard, hundreds of outlaws hunt along the lower part of the park or move on foot in a jagged exodus up the hill.”

By the mid-1980s, local residents were circulating petitions to ban cars from some of the most popular cruising streets. Disturbed by what they were encountering on nature hikes, officials at one local school put the park off-limits to student field trips. And in the interest of AIDS prevention, a gay and lesbian police advisory task force two years ago began distributing leaflets discouraging sex in the park. But the activity continues, sometimes in plain view.

Such was the case early one afternoon last November along Commonwealth Canyon Drive in the park. As a group of mothers with toddlers strolled by, a naked man stepped nonchalantly out of the bushes and walked to the side of the road, where his car was parked. There, he was joined by another man who, after a brief conversation, began masturbating in front of the first man.

City vice officers patrol the park from time to time, and two of them were in the park that afternoon, this reporter accompanying them on their rounds. They arrested the two men, charging them with lewd and indecent conduct.

“Why did you want to do it here in the street?” one of the detectives asked. “Didn’t you see there were other people around?”

“Stupid, just stupid,” one of the two men replied, shaking his head.

*

In 1896, there were no roads in Griffith Park, not even a road connecting it to the city. Nor did officials show much inclination to make the park easier to get to, putting off construction of an access route until 1910, when the park was finally annexed to the city. Indeed, Col. Griffith’s offer of land for a municipal park in 1896 was very nearly rebuffed.

One newspaper referred to the place as Griffith’s “rock pile”. It was rugged, inaccessible property, a mile beyond the city limits, which Griffith himself had not been able to sell during the real estate boom of the late 1880s. In the end, water was the issue; owning the park gave the city access to five miles of Los Angeles riverfront, a critical asset in the years before the Los Angeles Aqueduct was built. When Mayor Frank Rader formally accepted Griffith’s gift, his speech made scant reference to its value as a park. “This donation does not alone carry with it a gift merely of land value, so far as land value goes, but it carries with it something of still far more importance. It carries with it a valuable water right . . . .”

Griffith’s letters indicate that a long history of commercial exploitation of the park began soon after the city took possession. Tons of sand and gravel, excavated from the Los Angeles River banks, were being sold for 10 cents a wagonload. “Even the beautiful trees. . . have been ruthlessly destroyed and marketed for fuel,” he wrote in a letter to the mayor and city council. Moreover, he complained, the city was renting out several hundred acres of the park to private interests for growing hay and pasturing livestock. In 1903, a quarry was established in Bronson Canyon, and later a rail line was built to transport the rock which was used for street paving, rail beds and breakwaters. The quarry left a long cave that has figured prominently in many motion pictures, most notably in the 1956 film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Even after he gave the land, Griffith remained a vigilant defender of the park. But he was a difficult man, “pompous, eccentric and vain,” according to Eberts. And he eventually squandered what civic stature he had with an awful act of violence. In a paroxysm of suspicion and jealousy, Griffith shot his wife in a Santa Monica hotel room in 1903. She escaped death by throwing herself out a window. After a long trial in which Griffith blamed his crime on alcohol, he was sentenced to two years in San Quentin.

Griffith’s son Van inherited his father’s love of the park and determination to prevent its misuse. He peppered City Hall with protests and lawsuits, contending that the park was not an expendable resource. He fought unsuccessfully to prevent the construction of a subsidized housing complex for returning GIs, complete with stores and schools, after World War II. The village, built where the zoo parking lot and Autry Museum stand today, was home to 6,000 people and stood for eight years, until 1954, when public fury over socialized housing prompted its closure and dismantling.

Griffith had argued that the housing project was inconsistent with the terms of his father’s bequest--that the park was to be used for recreation. In the mid-’50s, he raised the same objection again in his unsuccessful efforts to prevent the construction of 2 1/2 miles of freeway across the northeastern boundary of the park. He failed again, a few years later, trying to stop the establishment of a dump in an undeveloped canyon.

The freeway consumed 260 acres of playing fields and created an orphan slice of parkland between the road and the Los Angeles River. Any illusions of bucolic tranquillity also vanished with the arrival of eight lanes of thundering traffic.

But it was the Toyon Canyon dump, into which the city poured 1,200 tons of trash a day beginning in 1958, that truly violated the heart of the park.

By 1985, when the dump finally closed, Toyon Canyon was no more. In its place was a bald, smelly mountain of refuse, 16 million tons worth. Exhaust from a daily convoy of trash trucks had killed countless pine trees on the road to the dump, and a 1,000-acre fire the year the dump opened was blamed on an overturned trash truck.

In 1978, city officials drew up a plan to cover the barren hilltop with native trees and shrubs. So far, that has not happened. A methane extraction operation, however, has removed the odor.

The city council rejected a bid to open a second landfill in the park in the 1980s. But old habits die hard. Sporadic midnight dumping still goes on, according to park rangers. Wrecked cars, appliances and sealed drums containing hazardous waste still turn up in the canyon bottoms, along with piles of worn-out picnic tables and park benches.

And a small amount of officially sanctioned environmental disturbance goes on to this day in the form of sand and gravel excavation from a hill behind the zoo. Just as it was in the 19th century, the excavated material is used to pave and patch city streets.

*

Yet, it’s hard to feel pessimistic about the park as dawn breaks above Mt. Hollywood and the park’s sinewy green hills materialize out of the night shadows. The daylight’s most remarkable revelation is how little things have changed over the past 100 years. In a city that has grown from 110,000 people to more than 3 million in a century, the park is one of those rare places where nostalgia and reality converge. It is still a refuge for many of the creatures--hawks, deer, coyotes, raccoons, and opossums--first noted by 19th century visitors. And much of the early man-made landscape has endured. There’s the merry-go-round where Walt Disney brought his children and Olivia de Havilland came with her sister, and the same golf course where Babe Ruth played and golfer Babe Didrikson met her husband George Zaharias.

Sunday picnics and birthday parties, nocturnal hikes and twilight horseback rides are as popular today as they were in the 1920s, when a local banker operated a chuck wagon for park equestrians and Mayor George Cryer--known as the hiking mayor--helped popularize the park’s growing network of trails.

And for lovers of Griffith Park, even adversity can be a blessing in disguise. Three years ago, facing several million dollars in street repairs it could not pay for, the park closed its network of mountain roads to traffic. Sagging shoulders and fractured concrete made the winding lanes too dangerous for cars. Today, the upper roads are a retreat for dog walkers, hikers, bicyclers, horseback riders and nature lovers.

“Even if we had the money to fix those roads, I don’t think the public would allow it,” says park superintendent George Stigile. Away from the weekend crowds, out of earshot of the freeway, the upper park is where one must go now to experience the park as Col. Griffith did, as “a place where the human soul can commune with nature itself . . . where things are as God made them.”

The son of a Welsh farmer who had come to America as a boy and traveled to California, Griffith saw the park as a cameo version of America’s heroic western landscape. And for 100 years, newcomers have reacted much the same way.

One is Liverpool native Charlie Turner who has been looking after Dante’s View after the death of the Brazilian-born Dante Orgolini, who planted the garden in 1964.

North of Dante’s View, a former customs officer in Iran, Amir Dialameh, began tending Amir’s Garden, a two-acre plot high on one of the park’s northern slopes, 25 years ago.

“I thought the park was like heaven the first time I saw it, but I didn’t think it was enough just to go there,” Dialameh said. “I felt some kind of duty to my new community.”

He bought a pick and shovel and headed for an area in the park that had recently burned. “I cleaned out the dead wood and then started planting: pines, oleanders, roses, ash trees, jacarandas, a silk floss tree. I put in steps and trails so hikers could stop in and enjoy the view.” Today, some of the first trees he planted are 40 feet tall.

After a time, people like Dialameh can take on a bit of the character of the park itself, their lives shaped by a lonely forbearance, solitary exuberance and a perennial adaptability in reaction to whatever surprises man and nature serves up. One season may bring a calamitous fire, the next a miraculous reappearance of wildflowers that no one had seen in years.

As much as anyone, Dialameh, now in his mid-60s, has come to symbolize the fragility and durability of the park. Five years ago, while working in his garden, he was attacked by three men who robbed him and beat him savagely. He worried about returning to the garden. Working by himself up there, he knew he was an easy mark. “But I couldn’t stay away,” he said. And he has come to feel safer since the park’s upper roads were closed to traffic.

“I try to make it up there just about every day and work for a few hours, now that I am retired.”

Afterward, he gives thanks. “I go home and take a shower, and then I raise a glass of wine and say thank you for what you did today. I toast myself, yes, and I toast our wonderful park.”