To get a sense of what Griffith J. Griffith achieved for Los Angeles, all you have to do is hike up to the summit of Mount Hollywood, the second-highest point in the 4,210-acre urban wilderness park that bears his name.

“I find it a miracle that you look out over the basin and then you turn around and you look over the San Fernando Valley, and there is all of this urban and suburban sprawl, and some way, somehow, in the middle of it, there is this 4,000 acres for all of us,” said Mike Eberts, a professor of mass communications at Glendale Community College and author of a 1996 history book on Griffith Park published for the park’s centennial. “And Col. Griffith made that happen.”

“If there’s a list of people who’ve really made Los Angeles a great place to live, Griffith would be very high on that list,” Eberts, a board member of the Griffith Charitable Trust, continued. 

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In 1896, Griffith donated a massive piece of land to the city to be used as a public park, which today remains both a key city landmark and one of the largest municipal parks with urban wilderness in the United States. (For context, it is more than four times the size of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.) The park likely wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for Griffith’s foresight to set aside the land as green space in the city’s booming early days; he declared it “a place of recreation and rest for the plain people.” But while Griffith’s name is now emblazoned on the park, an observatory and a major boulevard, his legacy is complicated. 

Construction of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, 1934.

General view of the Hollywood Sign above Lake Hollywood on April 4, 2025, in Hollywood, Calif.

In 1903, Griffith shot his wife in the face in a jealous rage and spent two years at San Quentin.

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“He was a flawed man,” Eberts said, adding, “I like to think of him as someone who rose above his flaws.”

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