Forest Lawn Memorial Park<\/a> is free to enter, filled with things to do and twice the size of Disneyland. No wonder it was L.A.\u2019s favorite attraction of the early 20th century.<\/p>\nWhen Dr. Hubert Eaton took over the cemetery in 1917, he reinvented himself as \u201cThe Founder\u201d and set upon creating \u201cA great park \u2026 filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers, noble memorial architecture with interiors full of light and color.\u201d Sounds a little like Walt Disney\u2019s park \u2014 minus the rides and filled with dead people.<\/p>\n
The ideals of both men are the focus of a new exhibition, California Visionaries: The Lives and Legacies of Walt Disney and Hubert Eaton, running at the Forest Lawn Museum through Feb. 7.<\/p>\n
It was Harrison \u201cBuzz\u201d Price, the consultant who selected Anaheim for Disneyland, who cited Forest Lawn as L.A.\u2019s top attraction, with attendance of one million when Disneyland opened in 1955. Walt\u2019s park drew 3.6 million that first year.<\/p>\n
That same year, 244,000 people saw a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, Griffith Park Observatory drew 550,000 and the precursor to LACMA had 743,000 visitors \u2014 and Knott\u2019s just under a million. So, the cemetery was certainly near the top. Marineland opened to 1.5 million guests in 1954 at a time when Olvera Street claimed 1.6 million visitors \u2014 so perhaps they were the big enchilada. Either way, Forest Lawn still draws just under a million visitors and Disneyland became a global juggernaut.<\/p>\n
Email your burning questions about L.A. to [email\u00a0protected]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To put it simply \u2014\u00a0for a period in time \u2014 yes Forest Lawn Memorial Park is free to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,90008,1341,192056,188545],"class_list":["post-493691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-ask-chris","tag-disneyland","tag-forest-lawn-memorial-parks","tag-october-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}