Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection The observatory was built during the Depression, when materials and labor were cheap and plentiful. In January 1931, the city and Griffith Trust hammered out the contract, with the Trust and the Parks Commission sharing responsibility for the project. This made a Los Angeles observatory with a planetarium (only the third in America, behind Chicago and Philadelphia) an even more exciting proposition. By 1930, the “bug eyed Planetarium,” which projected “the stars, sun, moon and other planets in miniature as they are seen in the heavens,” had been invented in Germany. In 1930, after many delays due to the complications of establishing the Griffith Trust, the city began a conversation with the trust about accepting the Observatory as a gift. When Griffith realized this, he decided to leave a bequest, eventually totaling $750,000, for the construction of a free “Hall of Science” and Observatory atop the peak of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park. He offered the city $100,000 to build an observatory, but Griffith’s reputation was such that the city was not interested in taking more of his charity-at least not while he was alive. If all mankind could look through that telescope, it would revolutionize the world!” According to John Anson Ford, Griffith exclaimed, “Man’s sense of values ought to be revised. In 1912, inspired by a look into the heavens through the powerful telescope at the nearby Mount Wilson, Griffith became determined to build his own public observatory in Griffith Park. After his release from prison, Griffith remained an enormously wealthy man but had become a social pariah. The plain people, as well as the city’s elite, felt their admiration for Griffith turn to horror in 1903, when, drunk, he told his wife to kneel down and pray, and then shot her in the face. “A place of rest and relaxation for the masses, a resort for the rank and file, for the plain people.” Griffith’s path to the observatory began in 1896, when he donated 3,015 acres of the old Rancho Los Feliz to the city of Los Angeles to be used as a public park. Griffith was a brilliant businessman and philanthropist, but he is perhaps best known for the attempted murder of his wife. The opening of Griffith Observatory was the long-delayed triumph of a dead man. Today, in the words of restoration specialist Brenda Levin, who led the building’s restoration and expansion from 2002 through 2006 with architect Stephen Johnson, Griffith Observatory is “probably the most recognizable and beloved building in Los Angeles.”Ĭrowds watch a lunar eclipse on the balcony of Griffith Observatory in 1949. “This magnificent structure, not only will be of value to scientists, but its greatest attraction will be to the masses of other citizens who will now have an opportunity to see how the universe is constituted.” Shaw accepted the building from the Griffith Estate on behalf of the city. That night, a crowd of 500 of the city's elite, glittering like a “presidential ball,” watched as Mayor Frank L. Ashley and compared by one Los Angeles Times journalist to “the magic work of a genie,” that gates were constructed to keep away looky-loos who had been “interfering with the workmen” preparing the grounds for the opening on the fourteenth. So great was the curiosity surrounding the domed structure, designed by John C. For months, motorists on Los Feliz Boulevard had “glanced up at the pile of masonry that loomed larger and larger, day by day” on the slope of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park and wondered when it would be finished.
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