LOS ANGELES PARKS 
By Charles Mulford Robinson 
AT different points of the compass and far 
^ ^ scattered, but each well within the resi¬ 
dential area of the city, there are three beautiful 
and very popular parks in Los Angeles: Eastlake, 
fifty-six acres; Westlake, thirty-five acres; and 
Hollenbeck, twenty-six acres. Though small, they 
are more visited by the residents than all the other 
parks of the city put together. Yet Elysian Park 
has ten times the area of the largest of them and 
Griffith contains upwards of three thousand acres. 
Such, too, is the location of at least two of these 
little reservations, that tourists also see more of 
them than of the other parks, and in memory find 
these standing out, justly or unjustly, as types of 
the Los Angeles parks. 
Now it so happens that there is a lake of about 
ten acres in each of the three, and that the landscape 
and planting effects in them are very similar. It is 
interesting therefore to note their dominant char¬ 
acteristics. 
An Eastern observer is likely, I think, to gain 
four impressions. The first will be of a flower 
garden. If he is familiar with Boston, his thoughts 
will go back at once to the Public Garden there. 
As that looks on a sunny June day, with its color 
masses, its splendid specimen plants, and the 
beauty of its individual flowers, so the park before 
him looks on a winter day. Indeed, there is so 
conspicuously the brilliancy of the Garden, that the 
stranger who knows well the latter has the astonish¬ 
ing sensation of feeling quite at home. The very 
lake is present, with its serpentine twistings marvel¬ 
ously preserved; its bridge not as much changed 
as one might have expected from the long journey; 
and the swan boats only pulled apart, so as to make 
separate toys of swan and boat. And it is likely 
as not that the people who sit around on the benches 
had baked beans for breakfast. They look entirely 
Eastern, as possibly half of them are, and this is 
a wonderful bean country. 
As one basks in the sunshine and turns from 
thoughts of his fellows to the vegetation and the 
landscape pictures, he begins, however, to get a 
second impression. He observes the differences. 
These are not as marked as he had reasonably ex¬ 
pected, and that first pleasantly surprising im- 
Courtesy Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce 
A CACTUS BED IN WESTLAKE PARK—LOS ANGELES 
