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“ He was Protestant, Christina was Catholic, and one day in 1903 while taking a "rest cure" in Santa Monica he shot her in the eye.
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In LA, it's fog or haze if you look up and can't see blue; it's smog if it's hugging the ground.
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The old Zeiss projector was there, looking like an invading space alien.
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The woman who presented the show was an actress—and there's some controversy about that; before, lecturers were more in the capacity of docents.
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It is one long display case, and inside is ... junk jewelry.
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In
Joseph Heller's masterpiece,
Catch-22, a man named Major
views the birth of his son as a golden opportunity. He flirts with
the idea of naming the newborn C. Sharp Major, or Sergeant Major, or
Minor Major, but in the end goes whole hog and names him Major Major
Major. Grown to be a man, Major Major Major is drafted, and as soon
as the generals in the Pentagon learn his name they promote him from
buck private to ... well, what else? Major Major Major Major. This
is so Senators can dance through the halls of Congress chanting:
Who promoted Major Major?
Who promoted Major Major?
On January 4, 1850, in the Welsh town of
Bettws
a son was born to a man whose first name I've been unable to
determine, but whose last name was Griffith. He must have figured it
would be a hoot to name his son redundantly, too, but he chickened
out and made his middle name Jenkins.
When he was 14
Griffith Jenkins Griffith came to
America to seek his fortune, and found it pretty quickly, in mining
and land speculation. By 1896 he owned great chunks of land around
the little town of Los Angeles. That was the year he gave
3015 acres of it, five times the
size of New York's Central Park, to the city ... which didn't want
it. (By the way, I got some of this information from an article by a
man named
William Ian Williams, if you can
believe that.) It was too damn far from anything, way out in the
middle of nowhere. There weren't any roads to it. Who would use a
mountainous patch of scrubland like that? But eventually they
stopped grumbling and took it. Griffith Griffith wanted to build an
outdoor theater, an aerodrome, and an observatory in the park. He
had a lot of plans, and they were all for the public good.
But he was widely disliked by the LA upper crust, who called him
"The Midget Egomaniac." He styled himself "Colonel," though he had
never held that rank in any army. He married a rich woman, Christina
Mesmer, and nobody could figure out why a classy lady like her would
hook up with a jerk like "Colonel" Griffith Griffith. (Do you think
he might have Mesmerized her?) And he was ... well, nuts. He drank
heavily, and came to believe that the Pope was out to poison him. He
was Protestant, Christina was Catholic, and one day in 1903 while
taking a "rest cure" in Santa Monica he shot her in the eye.
Still alive, she jumped out the hotel window and landed on an awning
below, which saved her life. (Jeez, it's just like a Hollywood
thriller, isn't it?) She scrambled in another window on the floor
below and survived, though disfigured.
At his trial his lawyers pioneered the "diminished capacity"
defense, contending that he suffered from "alcoholic insanity." The
jury at least partly bought it, as he was sentenced to only two
years. He served them in
San Quentin, where he refused
parole and did his full ride.
Even though he seemed genuinely remorseful and reformed, he was
about as welcome in polite society as a fart at a funeral. But he
was still rolling in dough. The City Council at first refused the
seed money he offered to fund his amphitheater and observatory, but
in the end no politician can turn down the green stuff. They did
punish him by changing the name of his park's highest point from
Griffith Peak to Mount Hollywood.
Colonel Griffith Griffith didn't live to see his dreams fulfilled.
He died in 1919, and was buried in what is now called
Hollywood Forever Cemetery under an
imposing obelisk. There's a statue of him at the Griffith Park
entrance at Los Feliz and Crystal Spring Drive.
For some reason, this strange tale just feels like a
quintessentially California story, a totally Los Angeles
story. And I researched the whole thing sitting right here at my
desk. God, I love the Internet!
ê ê ê ê ê
The
observatory was finally completed in 1935 and was an
immediate hit with Angelenos. It had a 12-inch
Zeiss refracting telescope that you could actually
look through. More than 7 million people have done so. It
had a
coelostat, and a
Foucault pendulum, and a
solar telescope, and a
camera obscura. It had a big
Tesla coil, and it had a
planetarium, famous for its
uncomfortable chairs with wooden headrests.
The building is in
Art Moderne style, which I
understand is a sort of Late
Art Deco. It is lovely, with white
stucco contrasting with the green-black patina of the copper domes
and trim. Los Angeles doesn't have a signature structure, something
like the
Statue of Liberty or the
Gateway Arch or the
Golden Gate Bridge, you look at it,
you instantly know you're in New York, St. Louis, San
Francisco. I've thought about it for a while, and I can't come up
with anything like that for Los Angeles. I think the observatory is
the closest we come, perched up there on the south peninsula of
Mount Hollywood nee Griffith, above the smog, visible over a very
wide area. The current observatory director recently referred to it
as "The hood ornament of Los Angeles," and that is so apt, and so
Los Angeles.
Well, the building got old, as these things do. Back in 1935 they
weren't building things anywhere near the 21st Century earthquake
codes, the next big quake could take the whole thing down the
hillside. Plus, it was showing its age in many ways. So the city and
the
Friends of the Observatory raised
some money—$93,000,000 is what I heard—and in 2002 they closed it
down for renovations. I think it was planned to take 3 years, but
they ran a little long. A few days ago, November 3, 2006, they
opened it up again ... and Lee and I were there on the first day!
ê ê ê ê ê
That was more of a coup than you may realize. There is almost no
parking up there atop Mount Hollywood, maybe 70 spaces, tops, and no
room for a larger parking lot (and no enthusiasm for cutting down a
lot of trees and replacing them with asphalt or digging an
underground garage). The road leading up there is two-lane,
non-expandable, and twisty. The people in charge envisioned
monumental traffic snarls and angry motorists fighting each other
for every available slot.
So they inaugurated a system of shuttle busses departing from
Hollywood and Highland, or the temporary observatory annex next door
to the Los
Angeles Zoo and the
Gene Autry Museum, both of which have ample parking on
flat land. They closed the road from the
Greek
Theatre (another Griffith Griffith dream that came to
pass) upward, only busses allowed. It is not known how long this
state of affairs will last. If attendance drops after a few months
they may open the road again ... but don't count on it.
Everyone in Los Angeles we've talked to is determined to get
up there, as soon as possible. Myself, I'd be perfectly happy if
they left that road closed to cars forever.
The website said you had to make reservations for the busses. As
soon as I heard about that, I dashed off on the www with the intent
of booking passage. I didn't think I had a hope in hell of getting
there the first day ... but I did! Departing from the
zoo at 2 PM. Cost: $8 per ticket. (There's an irony here. Admission
to the observatory is free, always has been. And it still is ... if
you walk or bike up, though you need a reservation even for that,
for now. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would find this no
more than a brisk afternoon's jaunt, but not me. It's long, and it's
steep. No, it's the bus for me.)
So we boarded the bus and were on our way. They showed a very
informative and helpful video on the trip, telling you the best way
to see the place, advising you to get tickets for the planetarium
show promptly upon arrival if you intended to see the show. And up
we went, past the Greek Theatre, through the tunnel, twisting along
the spaghetti road on a hazy, slightly chilly day.
The day could have been better, actually, but we weren't
complaining. In LA, it's fog or haze if you look up and can't see
blue; it's smog if it's hugging the ground. This was mostly haze, no
sunshine getting through. We could see part of the
Los Angeles Basin, but not as far
as downtown, and much short of the sea. But it was still a great
view, and next time we'll pick a summer evening when it's almost
always clear and warm.
The building and grounds are gorgeous, and you'd hardly know they'd
done anything to it, externally ... which is as it should be. Nobody
wanted to tamper with the classic lines. But looks are deceiving.
What they did ... basically they gutted the whole structure. I've
seen pictures of the work, and there was really nothing left of the
interior when they'd finished the excavating, just the exterior
shell, and they were drilling into that, reinforcing and patching.
(There are wonderful murals in the rotunda, and those were taken
down intact and conserved, then put up again later.) Then they
hollowed out the space beneath the building, poured new foundations,
and made two entire levels beneath it, more than doubling the
exhibit space. They turned these parts and the wings off the rotunda
into hands-on astronomy exhibits, and they are cleverly done (though
about half were not working; start-up problems, I assume, nothing
ever works exactly right the first time). The only place you can
detect a difference from the 1935 original from the outside is from
the west side, where a new entrance has been built, with stairs down
to the new lower levels. Even that is astronomically themed, and
called the Gottlieb Transit Corridor. Things illustrating various
events in the sky are embedded right in the architecture. For
instance, the handrail in the stairway points directly to the North
Star at night.
Down there is a gift shop and the Café at the End of the Universe,
operated by ...
Wolfgang Puck! Does anyone remember
when he was a renowned gourmet chef? Now he runs the food concession
at the Natural
History Museum and here, and sells canned soup at
Ralph's. He's one step up from McDonalds.
The grounds in front are immaculate. Lots of grass, a monument to
six great astronomers of the past, and a bust of
James Dean,
who starred in
Rebel Without a Cause,
which had many scenes shot at the observatory, both inside and
exterior. There are also metal lines etched in the concrete showing
the orbits of the planets, to scale. (Pluto's there, because it was
demoted shortly after construction was finished.) You
get a real sense of the difference between the inner and outer
planets. You can take one step from Earth to Mars, but it's quite a
few steps to Jupiter, and a real hike out to Neptune.
Inside, I went straight to the desk where they were selling
planetarium tickets ... and seemed to fall into a time warp. The
woman behind the counter was young, petite, gorgeous, and dressed in
a low-cut '40s black dress. Her platinum-blonde hair was in a
Marilyn Monroe style, she was pale, and wore bright red
lipstick on her bee-stung lips. Lee and I agreed she had a sort of
Carole Lombard thing going, and it
worked very well for her. I wondered if she always made herself up
like that, or if this was in honor of the opening. But I didn't have
the nerve to ask. We got tickets ($7) for a show starting in 30
minutes.
Later research, from Wikipedia:
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During World War II the planetarium was used to train pilots in the skill of celestial navigation. The planetarium was again used for this purpose in the 1960s to train Apollo program astronauts for the first lunar missions. |
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That is so cool! I never would have guessed a planetarium was part of the moon missions training!
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The planetarium was renovated in 1964 and a Mark IV Zeiss projector was installed. |
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It's been renovated again, the plaster dome replaced with perforated
aluminum for better reflectivity, and the old Zeiss Mark IV has been
replaced with a
Zeiss Universarium Mark IX. Several
million dollars right there. The facility never had a name before,
but now it's the
Samuel Oschin Planetarium, in honor
of the family foundation that donated a lot of money for it. Fine
with me; we need more supporters of astronomy and space. It's got
half as many seats, but they are recliners and are reportedly much
more comfortable. Seeing the old ones in Rebel Without a Cause
yesterday, I can sure believe it. I could have slept in mine.
But there's no danger of going to sleep. It's a great show. Here's
something from the website:
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Unlike many other planetaria, Griffith Observatory continues a 71-year tradition of presenting live planetarium programs with a lecturer who can connect with audiences and convey astronomical knowledge with enthusiasm and passion. |
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Passion describes it pretty well. The woman who presented the show
was an actress—and there's some controversy about that; before,
lecturers were more in the capacity of docents. The one in
Rebel was what I remember from other planetaria: rather dry,
earnestly educational, pointing out constellations with a flashlight
in those pre-laser days. Lee found the woman distracting, but I
thought she fit right into the show ...
... which brings me to a bit of a quandary. I like
educational, and I like star shows. (I don't like dry and earnest;
who does?) This show didn't actually use the Mighty Mark IX very
much except at the start. The majority of the show was an
Omnimax-type film, using computer
graphics to illustrate the size and timeline of the universe, and it
was an eye-popper. You got a real sense of the size of
the space we live in, of great drifting shoals of many billions of
galaxies, and the fact that each galaxy contains billions of stars.
Seeing it, how could anyone doubt that there are other planets with
intelligent life—and yet how could you not wonder how we'd ever
find them among the trillions of stars, assuming we ever
find a way to cross those unimaginable distances? Unless we discover
hyperspace or its equivalent, I don't think we'll ever
find anyone else, unless they're real close, like less
than 100 light years ... which is:
200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic
miles!
... if you're interested ... this in a universe that stretches
14 billion light-years in every direction. You gotta
figure there are billions of civilizations out there that we will
never, never, never be aware of.
I digressed. I was conflicted about the show. Maybe a little more
regular astronomy, and a little less show biz? The Mark IX is
capable of showing the sky from any position on Earth, of speeding
up time, going backwards in time, all sorts of cool things. About
all we got to see it do was show the motions of the planets. I'm not
saying the show wasn't educational, it was—it dealt with the
concepts of dark matter and dark energy, about as well as you could
in a show for the general public ... and I guess that's the thing.
In an era when you can go to an
IMAX theater and see things more eye-popping than this, I
guess a planetarium has to do its best to keep up. But maybe they
could do different shows after dark, when the serious astronomy
buffs show up for star parties and such. I know the show we saw
won't be there forever, and I plan to go up there every time they
change it.
Suggestion in the other direction: If you're going to go for the
Hollywood spectacular, go all the way. This show gives a damn good
impression of depth, of moving through infinite space, but a
polarized 3-D show is much more impressive. I speak from experience;
I saw one at Huntsville, at an IMAX theater, and I wish I could see
it again.
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Griffith Griffith's original telescope is still there, and the
public is still invited to look through it, though that day wouldn't
have been a good one, as by evening the fog was rolling in from the
ocean pretty thickly. We got in line and managed to get into the
building to see it—it's on an equatorial mount so well-balanced that
the operator can move it up and down with one hand—but there was a
media crew in there taping a story, and it looked like it would take
a while. There's this big wooden stairs platform on wheels that they
move around, because when you look at something near the horizon the
eyepiece is maybe twenty feet above the floor! Outside, we could see
the old copper dome rotating. Gotta go back and look at Jupiter and
Saturn through that baby.
There were six or seven media trucks in the parking lot, all with
their dishes up, all waiting to do a Live at Five report.
The restored upper levels were full of interesting exhibits, with
the caveat that many of them seemed worn out already or were not
working properly. I expect they'll work out the bugs. There was the
solar telescope, which wasn't too interesting on a cloudy day, but
the videos of sunspots and flares were. We didn't linger here, as
there were a lot of people around and the space was cramped. The
crowds were not overwhelming, thanks to the reservation system, but
we were anxious to get downstairs to the new Gunther Depths of Space
exhibit gallery.
This is a stunner. There are hanging models of all the planets, to
scale—Pluto is not much larger than a pea, Jupiter is huge—and
scales you could stand on to see what you'd weigh on each planet. I
remember something like that from the
Natural History Museum in San
Francisco, before they tore it down. The old Zeiss projector was
there, looking like an invading space alien. Much else to see and
do, but one's eyes kept being drawn back to the real jaw-dropper.
Description from the website:
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The Big Picture: At 152 feet long and 20 feet high, The Big Picture is the largest single astronomically accurate image ever produced. Comprising real observational data of a part of the sky showing over a million real stars, galaxies, and other celestial objects, The Big Picture features stunning detail of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies and beyond. Because the image for The Big Picture is drawn from recent all-sky digital image surveys by the world's most sophisticated cameras and telescopes, the resolution and clarity of the objects causes visitor perception of them to change as they move toward and away from the wall, including the illusion of depth and real increasing detail. In its immensity, detail, and execution, The Big Picture is unlike any exhibit ever undertaken. |
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Boy, they got that right. I think this may be the most impressive
thing in the place. It's produced on big ceramic sheets, so you can
walk right up and touch it without worrying about wearing anything
off. Or you can put your face a few inches away, and see just how
many galaxies there are in a square inch. Or you can go to the upper
level and look at it through a telescope, and feel like you're
looking at the real thing. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a
million objects on this big picture, and very few of them are stars.
The galaxies range in size from maybe a foot across to just little
fuzzy dots. So incredibly many of them.
... and then, to blow your mind once again, there is a bronze statue
of
Albert Einstein sitting on a bench
(where you can have your picture taken with him) and he's holding up
his hand, one finger extended horizontally about two feet from his
face. And the kicker is, that's how much of the night sky the
picture covers. Go out tonight and do that, hold your finger against
the heavens, and see just what a minuscule slice of the sky that is,
and realize that even this gigantic blow-up doesn't show a fraction
of the galaxies that are actually in that tiny bit of night ...
It's awesome, dude.
There is another theater down on the lower level, the
Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon
Theater. I wondered about that, did they name it after him just
because he's famous and played Spock? But it turns out he and his
wife were big donors, and supporters of the arts and sciences.
They're showing an 18-minute film in there called "The Once and
Future Griffith Observatory," and they say it's a multi-media venue,
so they can do a lot of things in there after the novelty of the
re-opening has worn off. We didn't see the show. We never happened
to be in the right place when they were letting people in. It's
free. We'll see it again on the next visit.
One more thing worth mentioning is the Cosmic Connection, a long
circular ramp taking you from one level to the next. It is one long
display case, and inside is ... junk jewelry. One of the observatory
trustees started collecting astronomically-themed jewelry 20 years
ago, when the planning started for this building. Stars, planets,
little astronauts ... 2500 pieces, stretched out in a long line that
is supposed to represent the history of the universe, starting at
the
Big Bang. I don't know about that,
but it was a charming display.
Next time you get to Los Angeles, this is a must see.
