Griffith Observatory

This is the third part in my "WiLA" series. "WiLA" stands for the working title I'm using for the small humanist manifesto piece I'm working: Wednesday in Los Angeles. I like the middle of the week metaphor, and the fact that it's contextually defined by it's title is also a component of the whole.

This is the post that will appear as an altogether different piece in the paper form. If the first piece, about the Basin, as expanded concerns the "who we are/where we come from" topic, and the second post, about CAFOs concerns the "what we put inside our bodies" topic, then this is of the "what we believe" kind.

Well, in paper form anyway.

A wealthy Welsh man named Griffith J. Griffith bought a large piece of land in the mountains just north of the city center of Los Angeles, and in his will bequeathed it to the city as a park, and even left money for an observatory to be built.

Griffith was quite a character. He used the apparently self-given title of Colonel, earned his wealth from mining interests, and in one bizarre episode, was put on trial for shooting his wife. She didn't die, but was given a divorce on grounds of cruelty, with Mr. Griffith being forced to pay for their son's Stanford education as part of the sentence. The jury's decision was reached in four-and-a-half minutes.

Here's the observatory today:



It's been used many times in films and even a few times in The Simpsons as a design cue.

The views from it are rather striking. The Hollywood sign is nice and framed:



The haze can be choking, though:



It was bright and blue most places in LA on this Wednesday, but not from up top. I like the look of the open dome:



Here it's hard to see, but this golden ray represents the sun's path on the summer solstice, our anniversary (note the Hollywood sign in the background):



One of the themes of the only-on-paper entry from the Observatory is: do you believe that a person's body is made of cells, and that those cells are in turn made of molecules?