Griffith Park was an 1896 Christmas gift to the city from real estate wheeler-dealer Griffith Jenkins Griffith (1850-1919). Born in South Wales, Griffith came to the U.S. around 1865. After making a tidy sum investing in silver mines, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1881 with dollar signs in his eyes. He bought 4,071 acres of Rancho los Feliz on the cheap in 1882 and soon made a fortune subdividing the land. (What he couldn’t develop – besides the future Griffith Park – was briefly an ostrich farm; trivial as that seems now, the railway built to take tourists to see the ostriches was instrumental in the development of Silver Lake and Echo Park.) Despite Griffith’s success, the L.A. elite pooh-poohed his boorish ways. So he married upward. In 1887, he took as his bride the refined Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer (1864-1948) – “Tina” for short. Now well-placed in society, Griffith made his 3,015 acre donation and requested that it be used as a public park “for the plain people”. But if civic leaders were already ambivalent about the boisterous Welshman, they positively soured on him in 1903. Griffith, a professed teetotaler, was in fact a violent drunk, which he revealed on September 4th of that year when he shot out Tina’s right eye in Santa Monica’s Hotel Arcadia during a paranoid rampage. Tina survived, filed for divorce, and Griffith spent two years in San Quentin. City leaders, still disgusted by Griffith’s crime, waffled on his 1912 offer to fund an observatory and amphitheater at the park. But they took his money after he died and built Griffith Observatory and the Greek Theatre a few years later. Griffith Park currently encompasses over 4,300 acres. Griffith Park Boulevard was originally Childs Avenue, after Ozro W. Childs. It was renamed in 1925.
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