A Great City's Safety Valve

Before any more time elapses, I'd like to mention a fascinating LATimes article from the end of May that gets at a number of great questions about place and identity, public and private--not to mention concern for social fabric and environmental health.

You may have heard that nearly 25% of Griffith Park, the 4100-acre crown jewel of the Los Angeles park system (which began as an ostrich farm!) was burned in a fire earlier that month. Now, competing interests wonder aloud what the future Griffith Park can become:

...[A]s officials plan for restoration, tough questions are arising about the very nature of a park that, like the megalopolis around it, is an eclectic, even messy hodge-podge of needs, desires and identities. Should this be a people's park where Angelenos can surreptitiously plant nonnative iris amid the sage scrub? Is it a refuge for hikers, golfers, tai chi devotees and equestrians? Should it have more room for soccer players, softball teams and picnickers? Or should one of the nation's largest urban parks evolve even more into a nature preserve, protected from people so that native wildlife and plants can thrive? It's a increasingly political debate that has profound implications for both the park and the city, where a dearth of parkland and recreation space has made the hills and canyons of Griffith Park a refuge for thousands each weekend, including many low-income families with few other open-space options. Some conservationists and scientists look at burned hills and see a blank slate, a golden opportunity to restore much of the park's rugged interior to its once-wild state.

Above: Griffith Park on fire (via flickr and the LATimes). Those specks in the second photo are helicopters.

In light of such disaster, how to redefine such a crucial shared space, particularly one that matters on multiple scales (neighborhood, city, region)? Is a grand unifying vision needed, or is piecemeal, idiosyncratic improvement the way forward? Griffith Park's history evidences the involvement of many different parties:

"Public parks are a safety valve of great cities," wrote wealthy mining expert Col. Griffith J. Griffith, who envisioned a park "for the rank and file of the plain people." He gave the city 3,000 acres of his ranch, which then sat amid undeveloped land a mile north of the city, on the far eastern slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains. Since then, a growing constellation of city landmarks — the zoo, Griffith Observatory, the Autry museum complex and the Greek Theatre — have made it a city centerpiece.

The "nature" in the park is equally full of quirks, leading to disagreement over what constitutes "natural habitat":

Before the fire, the hilly interior contained huge swaths of native habitat — despite the eucalyptus, Canary Island pines and other motley plantings at popular spots such as Dante's View and Captain's Roost. Hikers have planted their own trees around the park. Dante's View was a hilltop retreat of nonnative trees planted over the last 50 years by park users....

Backers of [the idea that the park should be restored to its original, wild state] believe the fire did so much damage in part because nonnative species spread haphazardly for decades as visitors tracked in exotic mustard, planted eucalyptus and carved their own trails up Mt. Hollywood. Even the bird sanctuary was shaded by redwoods and other trees not normally found in Los Angeles. Now, they envision a resurgence of native chaparral, with plants such as toyon, laurel sumac and blue-flowering lupine luring back back a wealth of wildlife.

"Oh, God, you'd have an incredible diversity of birds," said Garry George, executive director of Los Angeles Audubon. "You'd have many species of western wood warbler, flycatchers, vireos, all sorts of birds coming through." Others fear that too much emphasis on chaparral could strip Griffith Park of its distinctive, crazy-quilt feel — eucalyptus from Australia, ice plant from Madagascar, the pocket parks.

The terms of the project are enticingly difficult to define: what does "original" mean in the context of this particular piece of land, for example? "Native"? "Park"?

This situation brings to mind the words of a college professor who once posed a pair of rhetorical questions that seem apropos here: Do we put walls around the last Eden? If we do, is that to keep Eden in, or people out?