Crescenta Valley Park

Between 1934 and 1957, most of this area in Crescenta Valley Community Regional Park, west of Dunsmore Avenue and south of Honolulu Avenue, was a private park owned by the German-American League. Named Hindenburg Park in memory of former German President Paul Von Hindenburg, it was a center for German culture and hosted hundreds of elaborate celebrations with bands, plays, dances, parades, weddings, church services, Easter observances, Mayfest, and Oktoberfest, drawing thousands of participants each weekend and offering traditional German food and drink. In 1939, amid growing anti-German sentiment during World War II, the League renamed it La Crescenta Picnic Grounds. Before World War II, the park was also sometimes used to promote Nazi beliefs through political rallies and the Sutter Youth Camp, where American youngsters were taught physical fitness and also indoctrinated in theories of Aryan superiority, part of Adolf Hitler's racist ideology that led to the persecution and murder of European Jews and others who opposed the Third Reich. As Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, supporters of Hitler at times paraded here, but after the U.S. entered the war against Nazi Germany in 1941, many patriotic German-Americans joined the U.S. armed forces to fight Nazism. In 1957, Los Angeles County purchased the private park land and incorporated it into the larger neighboring Crescenta Valley Community Regional Park to the east.

Glendale, California · United States