Griffith Park (Los Angeles, California)

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4730 Crystal Springs Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90027
(323) 644-2050
www.laparks.org/griffithpark/griffith-park-home-page#pa...

Griffith Park is a large park situated in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles, California. It covers 4,210 acres (17 km²) of land, making it one of the largest urban parks in North America. It is the second largest city park in California.
Col. Griffith Jenkins Griffith insisted he wasn't trying to buy back the public's favor when he offered to donate money for an observatory nearly two decades after he gave Los Angeles the land for the park in his name.
By then Griffith had accumulated his fair share of critics. He was known to be pompous -- even said to have given himself the title of "colonel" after a brief stint in the California National Guard. While vacationing in Santa Monica in 1903, the well-known businessman, apparently in an alcoholic rage, shot his wife in the eye. He served two years in San Quentin for assault with a deadly weapon, and he never fully recovered his reputation.
In the early 1900s, many Angelenos were skeptical of the colonel's motives when he donated the parkland as a "Christmas gift." Some alleged that he ditched the property to avoid paying taxes. Others said he couldn't make back his buck on the unsalable land.
In his defense, Col. Griffith told the city: "Ours 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."
Griffith, who made his fortune in the mining business, believed he alone should spend his wealth. "I have always believed that great wealth should be disposed of by him who earns it and during his own lifetime," he wrote to the city. "I shall not, as others have done before me, will my money to be dissipated in amusement and profligacy, or as is too often the case, permit it to be wasted to the profit of judges and lawyers and selfish parasitical relatives."
It may sound like tough love, but future generations of the Griffith family were well cared for.
The eldest of nine children, Griffith, upon his death in 1919, left his younger siblings about $10,000 each. To his only son, he left about $100,000
When the Great Depression hit, the colonel's son made a bold move: He invested the family fortune in the stock market, waited out the downturn until the stock market went up.
The colonel's primary consideration was the park. He left $750,000 in a trust and instructed his heirs to spend it on the park.
Today the trust oversees about $2.5 million and has contributed to the Greek Theatre, the Observatory, the Visitor Center, computers for the golf courses and fences along horse trails.
Thirty years after the city inherited the park's deeds, real estate experts valued Griffith's land at about $50 an acre (more than a hundred times its value when the family owned it.)
Such open space today in Southern California could fetch as much as $50,000 to $100,000 per acre.

The park was badly damaged in a Spring 2007 fire.