Why Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round matters.
Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round is a historic carousel where Griffith Park's recreational heritage meets hand-carved horses, mechanical music and one of Los Angeles's most consequential surviving amusement structures.
Set along Crystal Springs Drive near Park Center and just south of the former Griffith Park Zoo site, the carousel occupies a wooded interior section of the park between the Los Feliz entrance and the Los Angeles Zoo. Its circular pavilion encloses four concentric rows of wooden figures beneath an elaborate painted ceiling, concentrating the machine within a purpose-built structure constructed for its Griffith Park arrival. Sixty-eight jumping horses fill the rotating platform, with carved bridles, draped blankets, sunflowers and lion heads distinguishing individual figures across the four rows. Two chariots supplement the mounted figures, preserving another component of the large park carousel format developed during the early twentieth century. The result is an unusually complete amusement ensemble whose pavilion, carved figures, painted overhead decoration and dense four-row arrangement preserve the physical character of American carousel building at full scale.
What defines Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round.
Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round is best known for a history beginning with Spillman Engineering Company in North Tonawanda, New York, which built the carousel in 1926 before its eventual relocation to Los Angeles. The Spreckels family purchased the machine for Mission Beach Amusement Center in San Diego, placing it within a coastal amusement development associated with one of California's most prominent business families. Its San Diego career later included the California Pacific International Exposition, where the carousel operated during the mid-1930s before Ross Davis acquired it. Davis, an agent for Spillman, moved the machine north to Griffith Park in 1937 and installed it in the location it has occupied ever since. The Davis family brought extensive carousel expertise to the undertaking: Oliver F. Davis had transported Herschell-Spillman machines among California fairs and carnivals, and Oliver, Ross and J. O. Davis became associated with historic carousels in Griffith Park, Balboa Park, Tilden Park and Golden Gate Park. Griffith Park had already hosted a three-row carousel beginning in 1935, making the larger 1926 machine a replacement for an earlier amusement operation. A brass-ring apparatus once added another dimension to the ride, allowing riders on the outside row to seize passing rings and earn another ride when they captured the prized gold ring. The carousel's route from San Diego amusement park through exposition use and into Griffith Park preserves a direct physical link with California's interwar amusement culture.
Mechanical music and successive stewardship produced another distinct chapter in the carousel's history. Warren and Rosemary Deasy acquired the operation from Don Rand and Edward Openshaw during 1984 and 1985, after the Davis family's ownership had passed through Ross Davis and his son John O. Bud” Davis. The transaction excluded the earlier Wurlitzer organs, prompting the Deasys to commission Don Stinson to build a new 165-scale band organ specifically for the Griffith Park machine. Los Angeles Recreation and Parks associates that organ with more than 1,500 selections of marches and waltzes, giving mechanical music a substantial role in the carousel's later operation. Walt Disney supplied the carousel's most consequential cultural association: he recalled sitting on a Griffith Park bench as his daughters rode and thinking about an amusement enterprise in which parents and children would participate together, an idea he explicitly connected with the origin of Disneyland. A bench associated with those visits and a restored Griffith Park carousel horse entered Disney preservation, and the City's 2025 asset inventory retained another “Disney Bench” from the period of his visits among the carousel holdings. Los Angeles acquired the carousel for $1 million in 2025 after mechanical problems had left it closed, transferring the historic machine into municipal ownership and setting restoration work in motion. The restoration campaign encompasses the operating machinery and all 68 horses, extending a stewardship history that has carried the carousel through private operators, Disney associations and nearly nine decades in Griffith Park.
How Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round fits.
Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round works as the anchor for a Griffith Park outing connecting Southern California railroad history, the interpretation of the American West and the scientific ambitions behind one of Los Angeles's great public institutions.
Begin at Travel Town Museum, whose origins reach to the late 1940s, when Recreation and Parks employee Charley Atkins proposed placing a steam locomotive beside Griffith Park's miniature railroad. Two small Los Angeles Harbor Department engines facing scrapping helped expand that idea into a broader transportation collection, and Atkins secured support from department leaders George Hjelte and William Frederickson before approaching California railroads for additional equipment. Travel Town was dedicated on December 14, 1952, as the steam era was disappearing from American railroads. Southern Pacific No. 3025, built by American Locomotive Company in 1904 with 81-inch driving wheels for high-speed passenger service, became the first locomotive preserved there. Continue to Autry Museum of the American West, co-founded by Jackie and Gene Autry with Joanne and Monte Hale and opened in Griffith Park in 1988 as the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage. Gene Autry conceived the institution around interpreting the West and its influence on American culture, and its seven original gallery groups were designed by Walt Disney Imagineers around themes extending from migration and cowboy history to cinema and popular imagery. Subsequent growth produced holdings exceeding 600,000 pieces spanning art, saddles, firearms, Hollywood Western memorabilia and extensive Native American collections, greatly widening the institution beyond its founding emphasis. Conclude at Griffith Observatory, whose creation followed Griffith J. Griffith's 1919 bequest for a public observatory and a planning process involving astronomer George Ellery Hale, physicist Edward Kurth and telescope maker Russell W. Porter. John C. Austin and Frederick M. Ashley received responsibility for the final architectural plans in 1931, and Caltech and Mount Wilson engineers developed fundamental scientific installations including a Foucault Pendulum, Roger Hayward's 38-foot lunar model and a three-mirror coelostat for solar observation. A 12-inch Zeiss refractor became the public telescope, and the 75-foot planetarium received a Zeiss projector before the building opened in May 1935. The progression moves from Atkins's preservation of disappearing railroad technology through the Autry's expansive interpretation of the American West and culminates in Griffith's publicly funded observatory, joining transportation, cultural collecting and scientific education within one immense municipal park.
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