Our guide to L.A.’s wild heart, quiet soul
TAKE A PLUNGE INTO THE MIX OF NEW AND CLASSIC IN GRIFFITH PARK
YOU CAN SEE just about all of Los Angeles from Griffith Park,” Mike Eberts wrote 24 years ago in his centennial history of the park. Thank goodness that’s still true today. In L.A.’s 4,300-acre wild heart you can reflect on the city and get away from it at the same time.
Its chaparral slopes and grassy picnic areas are bounded by the L.A. River on the north and east, the Hollywood Hills on the west, and Beachwood Canyon and Los Feliz on the south. But its culture and history reach much farther.
Besides the Greek Theatre and the Griffith Observatory, the park’s best-known attractions, there are camps for boys and girls, open lawns, gardens improvised by volunteers, a zoo, a museum, a vintage carousel, steam-powered trains, pony rides, a Sunday drum circle and a lone mountain lion.
On one of its golf courses 100 years ago, Babe Ruth learned that the Red Sox were selling him to the Yankees. And on the land where the zoo parking lot now sprawls, city leaders in 1946 put up 750 Quonset huts to house returning World War II veterans and their families.
Griffith Park is also where Walt Disney dreamed up Disneyland.
And it’s oh-so romantic. The park worked its magic on Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in the 2016 film “La La Land” when they took over a bench near the observatory to sing and dance their way into (or was it out of?) love. They’re not alone. People fall in love here all the time. The park routinely shows up on lists of L.A.’s best places to propose.
The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t changed the park, but it has changed how people visit. More locals than tourists can be found keeping their distance while walking on its dusty trails and paved roads, sitting on a tree-shaded bench at Fern Dell or spreading out a picnic blanket at Crystal Springs. It became a handy natural refuge when we had nowhere else to go. Pandemic or not, Griffith Park takes you to L.A.’s urban edge and plunges you into what remains of our wilder side, if only for a few hours. Let this mini-guide send you on your way.