Rodriguez

Noemi Rodriguez

Professor Lawrence

ENG 113B

18 February 2017

A zoo converted into a ruin

Griffith Park has always been a place where people can enjoy picnics and hiking. The

entire area is full of trees, wildlife, and attraction that the public can come and enjoy with their

families. Children would go to the park and have fun, meet new friends while the parents wait

for them on the benches. A lot horses pass by along with their riders as they ride through the

trails. However, long gone are the days of childrens laughter and popcorn attraction shows that

their having a good time and experiencing the open spaces. Up on the hills, there was the

Griffith Park Zoo which now turned into an abandon area where the public can explore the

deteriorated ruins and exhibits.

The area of the abandonment was silent, since there were not that many people coming to

this part of Griffith Park. Through the entrance of the zoo shows a sign of its history before it

was abandon. It was a city owned zoo built on the site of Griffith J. Griffith's defunct ostrich

farm which opened in 1912. The zoo had a total of fifth-teen animals, some that came from the

Eastlake Zoo. In a text A Whimpering Roar: The Old Griffith Park Zoo, Then and Now,

Hadley Meares described the conditions from the previous zoo before the animals were

transferred: The small city zoo at Eastlake Park featured accommodations so meager that all but

the finest animals have perished miserably in the cramped cages"(Meares, 1). With such a small

space, these animals can barely move around since they need wide open spaces. The option was
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to relocate the zoo where there is a lot of land to preserve the animals, thats when they chose

Griffith Park. Based on Meares: Many city leaders, plus the editors at the Los Angeles Times,

advocated moving the zoo to Griffith Park which is an ideal location for a zoological garden,

most of the animals can live under conditions similar to their native state (Meares). These

animals will have new and improved enclosures with lots of spaces for them to move around.

The Griffith Park Zoo became successful in the beginning however some of things were

not going too well. The zoo began to have a health crisis due to animals getting ill and dying

from diseases. The text Two Zoos in Griffith Park, Mike Eberts stated: Several lions had to

be destroyed after a veterinarian with the Health Department diagnosed them as having glanders,

a highly contagious disease. For some reason these lions must have gotten it from the meat that

they were given. Eberts mentioned Horse meat was substituted for beef. Results were

disastrous, many of the meat-eating animals, and almost all of the cats, died (Eberts). I believe

the horse meat was where these meat eating creatures must have gotten it. Glanders is an

infectious disease that occurs primarily in horses, mules, and donkeys which it can be contracted

by other animals, such as dogs, cats, goats even humans. The decision made by the City Council

was to remove authorization to feed beef to the zoo's meat eating animals so they will not get

sick. However, since these animals were not properly fed, the Park Department had to sell them

which they did not find any buyers. When the zoo began to renovated and expand the area, it

still fell apart. The Griffith Park Zoo was defined as an "inadequate, ugly, poorly designed and

under financed collection of beat-up cages. Meaning that the entire zoo was in bad condition not

only the animals. Ralph D. Cornell who panned the zoo in Griffith Park's 1939 Master Plan,

recommends that it should be either abandoned or moved to another congenial setting. Around

May 1958, an $8-million-dollar bond was approved to build The Worlds Biggest Zoo. It is
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confirmed that the Griffith Park Zoo would be closed down due to the establishment of the

upcoming zoo (known as the L.A Zoo).

Ever since the Old Griffith Park Zoo was shut down in 1966, it became abandon. All of

the animal exhibits remained which nothing was removed or destroyed. As of today, the

abandon area transformed into a picnic space where people can find a quieter and preserve place

to relax. A lot of benches were added to some of the old animal areas and was adopted into

Griffith Park, which welcomes tons of visitors each day. While people visit, they can enjoy the

beautiful nature that is surrounding the land and also have access to the animal enclosures which

gives them an experience on how these animals use to live. The abandon zoo became part of the

environment, it makes people realize that it also belongs to wildlife and that they should protect

it. All of the animals living in the wild would use these ruin as their homes.
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Work cited

Meares, Hadley. "A Whimpering Roar: The Old Griffith Park Zoo, Then and Now." KCET.com. N.p.,

13 Apr. 2015. Web. <https://www.kcet.org/history-society/a-whimpering-roar-the-old

griffith park-zoo-then-and-now>.

Eberts, Mike. "Two Zoos in Griffith Park. Griffith Park: Home of Beleagured Zoos. N.p., n.d. Web. 19

Feb. 2017. <http://english.glendale.cc.ca.us/zoo.html>.