Cut the Mustard

What to do with Griffith, the most misunderstood park in the land?

Comments (0) By Judith Lewis Wednesday, May 23 2007

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In the meantime, various ideas for restoring the scorched parts of Griffith Park have been floated, from reseeding landslide-prone hillsides to shoring them up with hay bales and straw; a petition has even been circulated to introduce goats for future fire prevention in the rest of the park. (“How hungry are they?” Kerbrat wants to know. “Because we need these hillsides cleared out now.”) Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger a few days ago promised to earmark a whopping $50 million for Griffith Park restoration, from recently passed bond measures — a sum that could pay a legion of park biologists for years.

The city’s Recreation and Parks Department is assembling a committee of experts to guide decision making, but not everyone has faith the department has the resources to do the job right, in a city that is often described as the most “park poor” major city in America.

Empty canvas: An obelisk of char is all that remains of a tree; a battle now rages over what to plant instead. (Photo by Ted Soqui)

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“We don’t want a repeat of the Master Plan process, where they hired people with no experience in preparing master plans for municipal parks,” says Joe Young, the co-chair of the Sierra Club’s Griffith Park Task Force. “The issues of revegetation, replanting and prevention of soil erosion should be addressed by competent outside independent analysts. They shouldn’t be Rec and Parks’ hand-picked favorites.”

Ultimately, however, unless local homeowner, environmental and neighborhood groups shoulder their way into the decision making, the reseeding and regreening of Griffith Park could easily devolve into an insider political process, controlled by City Hall politicians who are probably not even aware that Chicago, New York and other big cities pay extremely close attention to the wild lands within their borders — while Los Angeles lacks even a single Griffith Park biologist.

Cooper says that while he has no objection to officials putting in certain kinds of landscaping such as “a succulents garden on a vista point,” he hopes that Recreation and Parks finally finds some “experts” who perhaps understand that after a burn, chaparral landscapes perform spectacular restorative feats all on their own.

“We’ve got this thing in our head about how we need to turn every park in the country into Yosemite,” he says — that we’ve “got to plant pines, plant redwoods, build a stream. But you have to appreciate the extremes we have here. In its own way, this park is valuable.”

Images from Tom LaBonge's May 25 hike up the Mt. Hollywood trail with LA Weekly photographer Rena Kosnett