"Today is the dawn of the CCC camp of Tujunga which is outside of Los Angeles...We are prohibited to go within 10 feet of the fence, and it is most painful to be cut off from the outside world."
--Diary of a Japanese internee, March 15, 1942.The recent release of records at the National Archives and Records Center in Laguna Niguel revealed for the first time that the Los Angeles area had two detention centers during much of the time following the attack on Pearl Harbor: Griffith Park and La Tuna Canyon. These, and other facilities, were developed as the result of President Roosevelt's Relocation Order of February 19, 1942.*
The Griffith Park site, located on 18 acres of land where Travel Town is now, had previously been a Civilian Conservation Corps location. There were actually two camps here, located side by side; each were enclosed with barbed wire and had sentry boxes and floodlights.**
The Tuna Canyon Detention Center, located where the Verdugo Hills Golf Course is now, was also a former CCC camp. It had the same kind of facilities as the Griffith Park Center.
Both camps were detention centers as well as POW camps or transit centers for captured enemy military personel. They were meant to be used to house prisoners on a temporary basis either until they had a judicial hearing or until there was a train-load full of prisoners ready to go to Manzanar or Tule Lake. These detention camps were for American citizens of Japanese descent. Manzanar and Tule Lake were not prisoner of war camps for captured enemy military personel, as only civilian internees were sent.
Footnotes:
* This information is based on the article "Documents Offer Glimpse of WWII Detention Center," which appeared in the Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1995, p. A1.
** Recent research indicates that the Griffith Park site was used minimally as a Prisoner of War camp, from 1941-1942. Files document only a few prisoners, and at one point about 700 Polish refugees en route to Mexico. For more information regarding this research, contact the Travel Town Museum at (213) 485-5520.