Founding
Valhalla was founded in 1923 by two Los Angeles financiers, John R. Osborne and C. C. Fitzpatrick. The Spanish Mission Revival entrance structure was designed by architect Kenneth McDonald Jr. For the decorative stone castings, McDonald hired Italian-born sculptor Federico A. Giorgi, who had created 30-foot (9.1 m)-tall statues of elephants and lions for the 1917 epic film Intolerance and crafted the exterior of downtown's Million Dollar Theater. The gateway to the new cemetery cost $140,000.
The rotunda was dedicated March 1, 1925, with a concert by English contralto Maude Elliott. Picnickers spread blankets on the surrounding grassy expanse between three reflecting pools and flat cemetery markers, which were a new concept at the time. It became a tourist attraction and was used for concerts that were broadcast over radio station KELW by station owner Earl L. White. Just five months after the dedication, Osborne and Fitzpatrick were convicted of fraud. They had sold the same burial plots repeatedly — as many as 16 times — and netted a profit of $3 million to $4 million, according to Los Angeles Times stories of the era. They were fined $12,000 each and sentenced to 10 years in prison but served less than half the sentence.
Read more about this topic: Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery
Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)