In many ways, then, Griffith Park is a reflection of Los Angeles itself. It is both an urban oasis and an untamed wilderness, a manicured garden and smoldering chaparral slope. It is home to hikers, stargazers, cyclists, golfers, equestrians, train enthusiasts, Shakespearean actors, drum circles, museum patrons, kayakers, dog walkers, people walkers, environmentalists, developers, gardeners, charlatans, anarchic trail runners, secret handshake practitioners, ghost hunters, eloteros, zookeepers, dreamers, and everyone in between. I hope you have fun discovering it.
Native oaks provide a welcome respite from the SoCal sun.
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. Anza brought 240 colonists and 40 soldiers on this 1200-mile trek. Their journey took them along the Los Angeles River in what is now Griffith Park, and there is record of the party camping there, although it’s not clear exactly where—some scholars think it was near today’s John Ferraro athletic fields; a plaque near the Pecan Grove picnic area commemorates the expedition.
One of the soldiers in the Anza expedition was José Vicente Feliz, who returned to Los Angeles in 1781 as the military leader of Los Pobladores—the original forty-four settlers and four soldiers who walked from Sinaloa and Sonora, Mexico, to found El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Ángeles Sobre el Río de la Porciúncula (“The Town of the Queen of Angels on the River Porciúncula”—think about that the next time someone complains about people shortening the full name of the city to “L.A.”). This event is commemorated on Labor Day weekend with processions, Masses, and a celebration usually held in the Pueblo de Los Angeles at Olvera Street.
Feliz spent some time in San Diego but returned to the Pueblo in 1787 to serve as the governor’s representative. For his efforts, he was given a Spanish land grant from Cahuenga Pass to the Los Angeles River, including much of the flatlands to the south. The land became known as Rancho Los Feliz.
Feliz died in 1822—one year after Mexico won its independence from Spain. His daughter-in-law Doña María Ygnacia Verdugo took over the operations of Rancho Los Feliz and immediately exercised some pretty sharp business and legal acumen during a period of relative instability in the region. She registered a lucrative personal cattle brand, successfully petitioned the new Mexican government for a confirmation of her land rights to Rancho Los Feliz, and—perhaps most importantly—secured the rancho’s water rights to the Los Angeles River.
The next few decades were tumultuous for both the Los Feliz estate and for California in general. Throughout the 1830s and ’40s, tension mounted between Californios and Mexicans, and eventually between Mexico and the United States, culminating in the Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848. Even before California became part of the United States, American businessmen were moving into the region and taking advantage of the messy legal paperwork to basically seize rancho land. Doña María’s ironclad contracts kept most of them at bay, but by the 1850s she had sold off sections of the rancho to her daughters and passed the bulk of Rancho Los Feliz to her son Antonio, who would build the still-standing walls of the Los Feliz adobe house in 1853 (today, it’s the Park Film Office).