Crowds Dip Into Melting Pot at Multiethnic ‘Cityroots Festival’

On one grassy hillside at Griffith Park Saturday, about 100 people dressed in tie-dyed shirts and bright marching band jackets with daisy-stuffed pockets held hands and danced around in circles singing Beatles’ songs.

At the bottom of the hill a Mexican brass band strolled through the park, stopping to sing a ballad in Spanish to a Filipino family eating a spaghetti picnic lunch.

And not far away, the choir of the First Samoan Congregational Church sang out in four-part harmony while women from the Arshag Dickranian Armenian School served up plates of sarma , spicy rice wrapped in grape leaves.

Welcome to an unusual potpourri of events at Griffith Park Saturday afternoon, when several thousand Angelenos got together to celebrate the first “Cityroots Festival” and another group of loyal Beatles fans dedicated a portion of the park as “Pepperland.”

Continues Today

The Cityroots Festival brought out about 5,000 people, who sampled the food, crafts, music and dance of the dozens of ethnic groups in Los Angeles. Sponsored by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, the festival continues today and is expected to draw another large but leisurely family crowd.

The food booths were the big attraction, where park-goers would first stop to look at the platters of foreign food, then stumble through multilingual conversations in attempts to ask questions of the cook. Most would take the plunge and order a plate.

William Maude, 22, of Los Angeles closely scrutinized a skewer of Vietnamese style beef prepared by Lien Vo.

“There’s hairs on this, what is it?” he asked as if he was ready to fling the beef in the nearest trash can.

“It’s a vegetable seasoning,” Vo answered. “Eat it. Eat it.”

Skeptical at First

One Latino family was a bit skeptical at first, looking at a tray of injera , Ethiopian bread.

“It kind of looks like tortillas,” the man said in Spanish. “And what’s that? Beans?”

The cook recognized the word tortilla and laughed, offering him a piece of the Ethiopian bread and a scoop of lentils.

Food Carving

At a crafts booth, Thai immigrant Pratin Santiswatdinont--”my last name is long, just call me Pratin”--showed off the unusual art of food carving. She had turned a watermelon into a bowl of roses with the gleam and smoothness of fine china.

“If we want to eat a piece, you just cut off the petals,” she said.

Into Memorabilia

Meanwhile, the Beatles fans uphill were into serious memorabilia.

With permission from the city, they planted tangerine trees and ate marshmallow pies in honor of the 20th anniversary of the release of the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album. They hung cellophane flowers of yellow and green and, after singing a chorus of the title song, dedicated a plaque naming the park area “Pepperland.”