If it weren\u2019t for the long-ago gift of some 3,000 gorgeous sylvan acres from a cranky jailbird with a civic conscience and a large and very taxable real estate portfolio, we wouldn\u2019t have Griffith Park.<\/p>\n
Get the latest from Patt Morrison <\/p>\n
Los Angeles is a complex place. Luckily, there’s someone who can provide context, history and culture.<\/p>\n
By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service<\/a>, which include arbitration and a class action waiver. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy<\/a> such as personalizing your experience and ads. <\/p>\n Several years before the Welsh-born tycoon Griffith J. Griffith was marched off to San Quentin for shooting out his wife\u2019s left eye in a sodden, paranoid fury, he had donated 3,000 of Griffith Park\u2019s eventual 4,300 acres to the city of L.A.<\/p>\n Griffith was a puffed-up man of no amiable disposition; his fellow L.A. millionaire Alphonzo Bell, the developer of Bel-Air, mocked him as \u201cthe Prince of Wales.\u201d And yet this son of a grimy Welsh coal village dedicated his gift for the \u201crecreation and rest of the plain people,\u201d and laid down a challenge along with the deed to those acres: \u201cOurs is a rich city and a city of rich men, and I hold that it is the duty of every person of wealth to contribute liberally to the betterment of Los Angeles.\u201d<\/p>\n You could fit four Central Parks inside Griffith Park, but its massiveness can give a deceptive sense of how much park space the city actually has, spread throughout its confines.<\/p>\n The city of L.A. operates about 25 square miles of park space. But that land area is just slightly less than L.A.\u2019s estimated 27 square miles of surface parking lots. Dwell on that for a moment.<\/p>\n A vintage postcard of Echo Park and the nearby foothills.<\/p>\n (From the private collection of Patt Morrison)<\/p>\n Griffith Park, not exactly centrally located, accounts for about a quarter of that park space. And as is often true of other civic amenities, in both the city and county of Los Angeles, the whiter and wealthier the neighborhood, the more likelier it is to have a park nearby \u2014 like, orders of magnitude likelier. On one extreme, the calculation put the ratio at 0.7 to 1.6 park acres per thousand residents of South L.A. while other neighborhoods \u2014 defined as \u201cvery low park need\u201d areas \u2014 have a ratio of 52 acres per thousand residents.<\/p>\n As for the county of Los Angeles, about half of its 4,700-plus square miles are made up of the forests and oceans and deserts that encircle it. It\u2019s open space, but not exactly parkland. Some of the county\u2019s 88 incorporated cities are packed city line to city line with residents but desperately short of park space for them. In Maywood, where somewhat more than 23,000 people live in a little over one square mile, the city\u2019s park staff has had to step in to break up arguments among locals about who gets to use baseball diamonds and soccer fields and when.<\/p>\n How did we get to this condition, in beautiful, supposedly spacious L.A.?<\/p>\n Well, that\u2019s it right there. L.A. got so used to thinking of itself as an illimitably wide-open-spaces place that this got baked into our self-image and civic behavior. Look at those mountains! Think of that ocean! Lift up your eyes unto the hills, and behold all that delightful emptiness. Then look down, around you, at street level, and realize that we might be Manhattan with training wheels.<\/p>\n Through our three great population booms \u2014 the 1880s, the 1920s and 1950s \u2014 the business of L.A. was the real estate business. We hung out an enormous \u201cfor sale\u201d shingle and put just about everything on the market.<\/p>\n And boy howdy, how people were buying. The city that built out, not up, offered land aplenty \u2014 acres at first, then smaller and smaller parcels, fine and dandy, just so long as the front door shut out the world and the back door opened onto a yard, green, clean, and most of all private.<\/p>\n You know who wasn\u2019t buying land? Local governments. By the time cities began to realize they needed more park space, land was often too expensive for the city checkbook, and voters \u2014 chiefly homeowners content with their own lots in life \u2014 usually wouldn\u2019t vote any money toward acquiring it.<\/p>\n A vintage postcard of people boating in Westlake Park.<\/p>\n (From Patt Morrison\u2019s private collection.)<\/p>\n Cities appealed to developers to pretty-please include some decent parkland in their subdivisions, but the elected ones for the most part didn\u2019t have the will to use official muscle to insist on it.<\/p>\n By 1927, even the grow-or-die Chamber of Commerce was worried about vanishing open space, and it commissioned a report on what to do about it.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re ever in the mood to read a three-hanky heartbreaker of a book, skip \u201cThe Road\u201d or \u201cBeloved\u201d and pick up \u201cEden by Design,\u201d by historians Greg Hise and Bill Deverell, a book all about that report.<\/p>\n The report imagined an \u201cemerald necklace,\u201d an urban paradise of parks and rivers and open spaces and public beaches encircling L.A. County, and it also laid out the practical, political and financial mechanisms to make it happen.<\/p>\n The report was visionary, bold, even brilliant, and it\u2019s as close as we got to a modern Edenic L.A. It evidently alarmed forces within the chamber and the city that so much land would be devoted to public use and the public purse, not private profit. In a twinkling, the report gets disappeared from public view and public comment as completely as if it had been dropped off the end of the Santa Monica Pier. The report was a now-or-never call to action, and we kind of got never.<\/p>\n By the 1920s, when park growth had demonstrably failed to keep up with the population, Los Angeles already had a few pretty large and splendid parks, most of them the 19th century gifts of pioneering Angelenos: Griffith Park, of course; Elysian Park; Hollenbeck Park, soon to be hemmed in by one of the freeways that lattice Eastside neighborhoods; Eastlake Park (now Lincoln Park), and memorably Westlake Park, now MacArthur Park, dating to the 1880s.<\/p>\n From the beginning, Westlake\/MacArthur served a number of apartment dwellers, but the apartments and the dwellers have changed. Into the 1930s, the most prominent Wilshire\/Westlake buildings were glamour addresses like the Ansonia, and the Bryson, which actor Fred MacMurray once owned.<\/p>\n Nowadays, the apartments around MacArthur Park can be denser than Manhattan\u2019s. Thirty years ago L.A. firefighters found children sleeping in closets and babies snoozing in dresser drawers.<\/p>\n At UCLA, Claire Nelischer, a doctoral candidate in the urban planning department, has been researching basic questions about L.A. parks, like who uses them, and what do they need from them?<\/p>\n L.A. has those big, well-known parks, but it lacks that \u201cfine-grained network of neighborhood squares\u201d familiar in cities like New York and London, she said. \u201cWhere L.A. is really struggling is in that network of smaller parks that serve the central city, the everyday parks where you stop off for lunch or after work.\u201d<\/p>\n She also wonders whether even the suburban parks built a few decades ago in more upscale neighborhoods for one kind of demographic \u2014 the 9-to-5 workers with nuclear families \u2014 meet present-day lifestyle. \u201cSuburban parks assume rigid work-life structure,\u201d she said. \u201cThe suburban model\u201d \u2014 like tennis courts \u2014 \u201ceven those neighborhoods are changing hugely as well.\u201d<\/p>\n A vintage postcard of the Play Grounds at Echo Park.<\/p>\n (From Patt Morrison\u2019s private collection.)<\/p>\n Different needs from parks in different neighborhoods also require better answers. \u201cWho is the public?\u201d is one of them, she said. \u201cWe are making decisions about who we consider to be the public and what we consider to be acceptable uses in public space, and we use things like planning and public policy and politicking to enforce these ideas. And often these rules apply differently to different people\u201d; for example, \u201csome people are allowed to sleep on a bench, and some are not.\u201d<\/p>\n Nelischer has made a deep dive into studying MacArthur Park. She found that locals, especially immigrants who came here in the 1980s, look on the place as a back yard . They have \u201cwonderful ties to the place,\u201d she said, even into those years when MacArthur Park was stricken by crime and gang violence, and let down by city budgets that didn\u2019t extend to keeping the place as clean and safe and useful to locals as it once was. For renters especially \u2014 and it\u2019s true everywhere in L.A. \u2014 \u201cthose green spaces are not just recreational for those populations, but for health, well-being, social connections.\u201d<\/p>\n Nelischer is right that no one says \u201cno\u201d to parks. But once a park opens, once the ribbon is cut, the hands shaken, and the photographs taken, the money to keep those parks going, to provide the public services and the physical safety that are vital to a really useful park, is harder to come by.<\/p>\n Nelischer has talked at length to MacArthur Park\u2019s \u201cconstituents,\u201d especially young people and older people, and what they have in common is what they told her they\u2019d like: programs that connect them, young and old, like music, food, community gardening, reading. \u201cThey want seating, they want shade, they want bathrooms. They also want beauty,\u201d she said. \u201cFolks really deserve the dignity of beautiful parks.\u201d<\/p>\n Cities around here have been finding a few ways to add open space. Local, state and federal money bought up land along the L.A. River below Dodger Stadium and toward downtown, and L.A. finally made the Ascot Park hills in El Sereno into a nature preserve. Cities are also cobbling together constellations of pocket parks in heart-of-the-city neighborhoods, a fraction of an acre here and there, enough, maybe, for a picnic table or a play space.<\/p>\n There is another constituency for parkland \u2014 the homeless. Most parks keep sunrise to sunset hours. Homeless encampments in parks are 24\/7. They appear from Long Beach to Redlands to Venice to the San Fernando Valley. They\u2019re cleared away, and appear again.<\/p>\n Homelessness is an intractable problem, but its Venn overlap with public parks is on a different plane, because it asks, again, who are parks for? Consider the standoff, the protests, and the ultimate clearing of the homeless camp at Echo Park Lake a few years back.<\/p>\n It was always a volatile mix, the homeless, the protests on their behalf, the tactics of the police, and the people who live in apartments around the lake. This park, too, was their back yard, one they were too afraid to let their kids play in, uneasy about the drugs and trash and human waste. Paradoxically, the homeless whose presence made the neighbors feel unsafe said they felt safer there than just about anywhere else.<\/p>\n Everybody loves parks, but not always for the same reasons at the same time.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1778063829_855_.jpeg\")
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