One of the most recognizable areas in Los Angeles is
Griffith Park. This 4,300-acre park is home of the Autry Museum of the American
West, The Los Angeles Zoo, The Griffith Observatory, as well as the Hollywood
sign. It is a massive park in the middle of Los Angeles, which varies in
geography from flat, green athletic fields to rugged trails that lead into the
hills peppered with native plants. This magnificent park was once part of the
Rancho Los Feliz, the ranch owned by Griffith Jenkins Griffith.
Griffith was born in South Wales on January 4th, 1850. As a young boy, he was taken to America by his uncle and spent part of his youth in Pennsylvania where he became a journalist. His journalism career brought him to San Francisco in the 1870s, where he reported on the mining beat in Early California. This experience made him an expert on the mining business, at least he thought so. He used this expertise to get a small fortune from the mine owners who employed him. In 1882, Griffith came to Los Angeles, which at this time was mostly ranch lands and farms but was beginning to become more industrial with a bustling downtown area. He soon bought the Rancho Los Feliz from Thomas Bell. Griffith spent tons of money on sheep and cattle and horses to try to make it a productive rancho, but to no avail.
In 1887, Griffith married Miss Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer in
a beautiful society wedding. A Los Angeles Times reporter commented, “By this
marriage two immense estates were united. The large possessions of G.J.
Griffith and a vast amount of Los Angeles property owned by the charming bride,
Miss Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Mesmer,
familiarly known among her most intimate society friends as ‘Tina.’” This marriage was a sham. Tina and he
sister Lucy, were the heiresses to a quarter of a million-dollar fortune left
for them by a family friend, Andre Briswalter. A quarter of a million doesn’t
sound like much but that is 8.2 million in today’s money. Griffith thought that
Tina was the sole heir, and when he found out that Lucy got half, he called off
the wedding and Mesmer family, who feared the shame that would come to the
family agreed that if Griffith married her, Tina would be given the whole
fortune. Griffith demanded that the money come to him, rather than Tina, in
order to “protect” her from swindlers. At their wedding breakfast, Griffith
told his new family that he was going to say goodbye to his friends that came
to the wedding. Instead of saying his goodbyes, Griffith went to the courthouse
that was right across the street and within six minutes he transferred 250,000
dollars from Tina to himself and then went back to the breakfast.
Soon After the marriage, Tina gave birth to their only
child, a son, named Vandall. Griffith himself had injected himself into Los
Angeles society. He gave himself the rank of Colonel even though he never was
in the military, only the reserves, where his rank was Major.
Giffith survived an assassination attempt in October 1891.
One of his tenants ran an ostrich farm that was doing poorly. and after falling
behind in rent, he became deranged. He
ambushed Griffith and his wife and her sister in their carriage on their way to
bring flowers to the grave of Tina and Lucy’s mother who had passed earlier
that year. The would-be assassin shot at Griffith, grazing his head with
buckshot, then the tenant rode away. Upon realizing that the assassination attempt
failed, the tenant drew a revolver from his pocket and placed the gun behind
his left ear and took off the back of his head. Griffith himself was only mildly
injured.
In December 1896, Griffith and his wife gave a goodly
portion of the Rancho Los Feliz to the city as a “princely gift”. His enemies
such as Horace Bell, actually thought the reason for the gifting of the land
was because Griffith’s ranch had failed, and he was donating the land for tax
purposes. The 3,015-acre allotment of land to be used as a park for “the
plain-people” of Los Angeles as Griffith described the populace of the city. It
was called a Christmas gift to the city.
Griffith came across as a teetotaler and even gave money to
the temperance movement in Los Angeles, but he was actually a secret alcoholic.
As Tina later told, “He never left the house without taking a drink, and he
never came into the house without taking one, and, of course, I don’t know how
many he took in between.” In May 1903, Griffith in a drunken rage threatened
Tina with a gun at the Hotel Freemont. Their marriage was in shambles, but they
kept up appearances because Griffith himself was a very proud man and didn’t
want the public to know that he was a drunk and a wife abuser. During the
summer of the same year, the family took a trip to Santa Monica and stayed in a
suite at the Hotel Arcadia. Griffith himself was on an alcoholic bender and he
became paranoid and thought that people were out to kill him. He even went as far as to have the soup
changed at the last minute in the hotel dining room because Griffith feared
that he could be poisoned. On September 4th, Tina was packing their
belongings to return home from the hotel when Griffith stumbled into the room,
carrying a revolver in one hand and his Prayer book in the other. He made Tina
kneel down before him and he asked her to swear upon the prayer book, as if it
was the Bible, if she had heard anything about Briswalter (the person who gave
Tina and Lucy their fortune) being poisoned. He then asked her if she or anyone
she knew was trying to poison him. He then asked the coup de grace of
questions, had she always been faithful to her wedding vows. And she said, according to her court
documents, “As God is my Judge, I have, and you know that I have.” At that, he
shot her.
The bullet split into two pieces upon impact. One half went
into the bone next to her frontal lobe, the other half went downward and tore
out her right eye. Tina then ran to a window and plummeted out onto the roof
and was found by a couple staying in another suite below. Tina would spend a
month in the hospital recovering, but the damage to her eye and face was
extensive. Shortly after the shooting Griffith
was arrested for trying to kill his wife.
If Griffith could be called the OJ Simpson of the time, his
lawyer, Earl Rogers, would be Johnnie Cochran. Rogers had defended 77 accused
murderers and had lost only 3 of the trials. Rogers would go on to defend
Clarence Darrow when he was accused of jury tampering in the case of the LA
Times bombing. Earl Rogers was a genius, and an alcoholic, just like Griffith,
so his defense against the charges of attempted murder was that Griffith had a
bout of “alcoholic insanity”, so he was not responsible for his actions.
Witnesses were called in about his alcoholism and paranoid delusions. Finally,
on November 3, 1903, Tina gave her testimony. She wore a veil and tinted
glasses, because of the injuries to her face and her ruined eye. She was
questioned for several hours before she fainted on the stand, then after she
rested in a nearby office, she regained her strength to continue the testimony.
In the end, the jury pronounced an acquittal for the charge of attempted
murder, but they got Griffith on a lesser charge of assault with a deadly
weapon. For that he got two years in San Quentin. Tina was awarded some cash, a
divorce and custody of their son.
After 20 months Griffith was released, and he claimed that
he was a new, humbler man and began trying to restore his name. He demanded to
know why the city hasn’t done more with the land he donated as a park, even
though the fledging Los Angeles was having money issues of its own. In 1908,
Griffith went to Mt Wilson observatory, and he became fascinated with the
heavenly bodies. Griffith later wrote, "If all mankind could look through
that telescope, it would change the world." Out of that experience, Griffith
knew what he wanted at the top of Griffith Park.
In 1912, Griffith offered money to the city of Los Angeles
to build an observatory at Griffith Park and in 1913, he offered money to build
a public theater, the Greek. But the city fathers turned down the offers
because of Griffith’s past. Finally, Griffith Jenkins Griffith died of liver
disease in 1919. In his will, Griffith gave the city the money in a trust for
the building of the observatory as well as the theater. Even though the city
was not fond of the idea, the trust made sure that the money was used only for
the creation of these two structures.