Griffith Park

Griffith Park was given to Los Angeles by a man who shot his wife. Griffith J. Griffith — Welsh immigrant, mining speculator, self-styled 'Colonel' — donated 3,015 acres of Rancho Los Feliz to the city on December 16, 1896: 'a place of rest and relaxation for the masses... for the plain people.' It was then the largest urban park in the world. Seven years later, in a Santa Monica hotel room, Griffith shot his wife Tina in the face — she survived, leaping from the window; he served two years at San Quentin and returned to find the city wanted nothing to do with him.

The park outgrew its donor. His 1919 bequest built the observatory — the 1935 building that became the world's leader in public astronomy, where seventy million people have looked through the telescopes — and the Greek Theatre. The park took everything else the century threw at it: the old zoo's cages, the ghost legends (the rancho's curse, the haunted merry-go-round that inspired a Disney story), and the 1933 fire that killed twenty-nine relief workers — still one of the deadliest in California history.

The observatory is the piece the world knows — Rebel Without a Cause, La La Land, the dome against the Hollywood sign. But the park's five thousand acres hold the fuller record: the rancho land granted to Corporal Feliz in the 1790s, the donor's crime, the fire's dead, and the public ground Griffith's money bought and his shame couldn't taint.

Griffith Park is the archive's tainted-gift file — the largest urban park of its era donated by a man who later shot his wife, holding the observatory, the Greek, the zoo ruins, and the fire's dead above the city it serves.