Griffith Observatory

Where it sits. The observatory stands at 2800 East Observatory Road on the south slope of Mount Hollywood, about 1,130 feet above the Los Angeles basin and roughly five road miles from the Hollywood Freeway. The building faces due south, which is why the view from its front lawn is the postcard version of the city: Los Feliz and Hollywood in the near ground, the downtown towers slightly left, the Pacific and Catalina Island on clear winter afternoons, and the Hollywood Sign over the right shoulder on the ridge of Mount Lee. Griffith Park itself, at more than 4,200 acres, is one of the largest municipal parks in North America, and the observatory is its most visited building.

The story behind it. The land and the money both came from Griffith J. Griffith, a Welsh-born mining speculator who gave the city 3,015 acres of the old Rancho Los Feliz in 1896 and left a bequest in 1919 for a public observatory, a hall of science and a Greek theatre. Griffith's condition was that admission remain free forever, and it still is. Architects John C. Austin and Frederick M. Ashley drew the building with technical guidance from Caltech's George Ellery Hale and from Russell W. Porter, the polar explorer turned telescope designer. It opened on 14 May 1935. The style is Art Deco laid over a Beaux-Arts plan: poured concrete, a symmetrical three-dome silhouette, copper cladding that has weathered to a soft green. The central dome covers the planetarium; the east dome holds the telescope; the west dome houses solar instruments fed by a triple-beam coelostat.

What is inside. The 12-inch Zeiss refracting telescope in the east dome has been open to the public on every clear night since 1935, and more people have looked through it than through any other telescope on Earth — the running count passes eight million. In the central rotunda a Foucault pendulum swings inside a brass rail while the building turns beneath it, under ceiling and wall murals painted in 1935 by Hugo Ballin showing the classical sky gods and the advance of human science. The Gunther Depths of Space hall downstairs holds the Big Picture, a 152-foot-wide astronomically accurate image of a sliver of the Virgo cluster. A 2002–2006 renovation costing about 93 million dollars added 40,000 square feet of new space underground, rebuilt the planetarium as the Samuel Oschin Planetarium with an aluminium dome and a Zeiss Mark IX star projector, and tucked the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon theatre into the hillside. On the front lawn the 1934 Astronomers Monument, carved under Archibald Garner for a Depression-era public art programme, honours Hipparchus, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Herschel.

On screen. Few buildings in California have been filmed more often, and three appearances did most of the work.

• Rebel Without a Cause (1955): the class trip to the planetarium show, and then the knife fight staged outside on the terrace and in the parking lot. A bronze bust of James Dean by Kenneth Kendall was installed on the west lawn in 1956 and still stands at the edge of the grass, facing the city.
• The Terminator (1984): the opening arrival, where the machine materialises in the observatory's east parking lot and takes clothes from a group of punks on the terrace steps. The geography in the film is exactly the geography on the ground.
• La La Land (2016): Sebastian and Mia slip into the building after a screening of Rebel Without a Cause, then waltz into the air inside the planetarium. The exteriors, the lawn and the terrace are the real place; the weightless dance was built as a stage sequence with the dome recreated, so the interior you see on screen is not something a visitor can stand in.

What you actually see today. Entry to the building and the grounds is free; only planetarium shows carry a ticket. The roof terraces are open, with coin-operated telescopes and a promenade around the domes that stays busy from late afternoon onward. Staff and volunteers set up portable telescopes on the front lawn on public star-party evenings, and the monthly schedule includes free talks. The café at the end of the universe sits on the lower level, and the walk out to the west lawn gives the cleanest sightline to the Hollywood Sign.

Getting there and timing. The observatory is closed on Mondays and opens from noon on weekdays and from 10am at weekends, staying open to 10pm — the late hours are the point, since the sky matters more than the building. Parking on Observatory Road and West Observatory Road is metered and fills by mid-afternoon on weekends; the DASH Observatory shuttle from the Vermont/Sunset Metro station is the reliable option. Walkers climb from the Fern Dell entrance or the Greek Theatre lot, both around a mile uphill. Air is clearest from November through April after rain; May and June bring the marine layer, which often means the city disappears under cloud while the observatory sits above it in sunshine.