The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 43

Cos Attacks (Times CCPart II I I CS- Sunday, May 26, 1985 By JERRY COHEN, Times Staff Writer Griffith Park is a recreational expanse spread across mountain, canyon and meadow and ranging in altitude from 325 feet to 1,625 feet atop Mt. Hollywood, from which on a clear day you really can see to Catalina and beyond. Even during times of fog and smog, downtown Los Angeles shimmers like a fantasy below and to the southwest of the mountain, the highest point in this unique urban oasis that many of us are inclined to take for granted. Residents of the city and its environs accept the park's presence unthinkingly as they rocket their motorcars along the adjacent freeways and past the fine homes of Los Feliz Boulevard. But to a stranger, say, a tourist from another city, coming upon it for the first time, the park is an unfailing astonishment because of its rusticity, vastness and stunning diversity.

Such a visitor encounters contrasting scenes that range from haunting wilderness landscapes to tableaux as civilized as the cocktail hour in the sporty golf clubhouse. "We provide the grass and the people do their own thing. That's what's unique about Griffith Park," said senior park ranger Dave Gonzales. "It's so large and has so many people doing so many different things. Like the hikers climb up to Dante's View or Captain's Roost and that's their world.

They don't know or care what's happening on the golf course or the picnic grounds. While the ten-speeders down below never notice the hikers." In many respects, Griffith Park is a metaphor for the vast and diverse city that it serves. As is true elsewhere in Los Angeles, languages other than English are heard more and more on the park's playing fields and in its glens. The homeless find in it quiet places to camp out. And the city's many unconnected segments of population are reflected in the complexions and recreational habits of visitors to the park.

All institutions fall on hard times, and the park has been no exception, as city officials are the first to admit. The almost simultaneous passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 and the elimination of the federal Comprehensive Employment and Train- nortX1 Git lli til Park Today A Look at the ing Act program cut deeply into manpower. "People are tired of hearing that excuse and I don't want to hide behind it," said James Hadaway, general manager of the city Recreation and Parks Department. "But the truth is that for several years trails were not maintained as well and brush and fire crews were not getting their maintenance done." But recently maintenance has taken an upturn, Hadaway said, and several sprucing-up programs began. "We hit rock bottom a year ago," he said.

"Now the city is putting more money in the department's budget and next year looks even better." And crime has declined after a recent spurt. Even though Griffith Park attracts hordes of visitors upward of 10 million each year the vast majority are casual callers. They go to golf or to play tennis or to picnic. To lift a child or a grandchild onto the carrousel, a pony ride, the miniature train. To hike the mountain trails.

To jog. To bike. Or even to play the bongo drums on Sunday. and Yesterday They visit to gawk at the animals in the zoo or to marvel at dazzling observatory shows. Or merely to loll in the sun at the entrance to leafy Fern Dell, only a stroll from Hollywood's tacky pornography joints and fast-food jumble.

This casual attitude of the majority, however, does not diminish the park. Quite the contrary. It validates the expanse of natural beauty and man-made prettifying for what it is: a municipal treasure that offers something for everyone. Even at its busiest times, the park left its signature on the parkland as it exists today. During the last 150 million years, it has been blanketed, stippled and filigreed with the debris of successive convulsions of the Earth's crust.

Scientists know this because the oldest exposed rocks in the park go back that far into prehistory. Because of the different ages it lay under the sea only to be reborn, said Caltech geology professor Leon Silver, "it has an enormous geological variety. You see young and old rocks, the new juxtaposed against the old because of the many cycles that affected the land." Griffith Park is part of the Hollywood Hills, which constitute the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains. Between 1 Please see HISTORY, Page 3 Griffith Jenkins Griffith offers regions of solitude for those who would retreat from the clamor of big city life. The park is simply so big, said one horseman, that "you can ride all day and not pass the same place twice." It is, in fact, the biggest municipal park in the United States entirely surrounded by an urban environment.

Phoenix has one which covers a larger land mass, but it is bordered on three sides by desert. Five parks the size of Manhattan's Central Park, probably the nation's most romanticized municipal commons, would be needed to equal its Los Angeles counterpart. But more than size marks the differences between the two parks a continent apart, which celebrate hugely dissimilar metropolises. Central was created by man in its entirety; Griffith was there. Except for some gentle sloping, Central Park is almost entirely flat.

Practically every one of its hundreds of thousands of trees and bushes was planted. Dozens of entrances provide New Yorkers with quick access to the park by foot. The Griffith Park terrain, by contrast, is a a jumble of topography, ranging from emerald lawn to rugged forest. Its flora is largely native, unlike much of the plant life elsewhere in the city. Only nine entrances serve it, so that most who visit the park arrive by auto, bus, bicycle or horse one exception being bedraggled transients who sneak in at night to sleep.

But Griffith Park's identity is as deliberate in its own way as Central Park's. Historically, a conscious effort has been made to keep it Arcadian. Richard Ginevan, the park's chief supervisor, calls the park "a passive recreational facility. We like to keep it as natural as possible." Comparatively little of the activity in the park is scheduled formally. Said general manager Hadaway: "We get a proposal a week from someone wanting to put something new in the park, from a Shakespearean Theater to a Museum of Science and Industry.

Every week. That's not what the park is supposed to be about." Only 20 of the park bears the mark of the landscaper or builder, the remainder existing virtually as it did when Col. Griffith Jenkins Griffith, a wealthy Welch-born immigrant given to sybaritic tastes and an intemperate disposition. Please see PARK, Page 2 zzmnx i i i iiiTii i 7 9 2 4 6 i iVi-j'i'iHViH't 7 9 2 4 J. S.

What is known of Griffith Park's past can be documented with certainty in two respects: Scientists know it was born amid spectacular geological upheaval. And its founder's biography is an oft told but quirky one. However, who lived there during the several thousand years before the coming of the white man and how its prehistoric residents comported themselves rests on some shaky archeology. Ever since the dinosaurs were alive and well, Los Angeles' matchless urban sanctuary has been a frequent truant from the surface of Planet Earth. It has emerged from the seas during one cycle to be hammered below the ocean during another.

Each geological age has I 2 4 6 2 4 6 7 9 7 9 "Public parks are a safety valve of great cities and should be accessible and attractive, where neither race, creed nor color should be excluded." I.M'.'JM.l'.'i.T BfA.l l.T Hourly average pollution, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Ozone: invisible, irritates and impairs breathing. Nitrogen dioxide: brown, impairs breathing and harms vegetation. Carbon monoxide: invisible, reduces blood's oxygen.

Clean air standard (Blanks indicate missing data) 1 1 st stage episode; air unhealthful for everyone 2 2nd stage episode; air hazardous for everyone 'Nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide not measured. Sotrca: South Coast A Quafetv Mngmant Dwtnct 6 1 vrivwn 7 9 2 4 1 0 rtiSii'M-EHV-H 7 9 2 4 6 4 7 9.