Hollywood Bowl

Where it sits. The Hollywood Bowl fills Bolton Canyon, a natural bowl in the Cahuenga Pass at 2301 North Highland Avenue, about a mile north of Hollywood Boulevard and immediately below the ridge that carries Mulholland Drive. The canyon's shape did the acoustic work before any architect arrived: a shallow amphitheatre of hillside opening south-east, with the stage at the low end and terraces of seating stepping up between eucalyptus and pepper trees. Capacity is roughly 17,500, which makes it one of the largest natural amphitheatres in use anywhere.

The story behind it. A group of arts organisers led by Christine Wetherill Stevenson and Artie Mason Carter bought the canyon, then known as Daisy Dell, in 1919 for community performances. An Easter sunrise service was held on the slope in 1921, and on 11 July 1922 the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave the first Symphonies Under the Stars concert with Alfred Hertz conducting, the audience seated on wooden benches and packing crates on the bare hillside. The Bowl has run a summer season nearly every year since, interrupted only by wartime restrictions, and it remains the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well as the base of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

The shells. The band shell has been rebuilt more often than any other part of the site, and its history is a genuine piece of architectural history. Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, designed a pyramidal timber shell for 1927 and a second, elliptical one for 1928 built from lumber salvaged from the first; both were praised acoustically and both were demolished. In 1929 the Allied Architects produced the concentric-ring shell that became the Bowl's emblem, a stack of nested arches that appeared on record sleeves and postcards for seventy-five years. That structure was finally replaced in 2004 by a larger shell from Hodgetts + Fung which deliberately reproduces the 1929 silhouette while carrying modern acoustic and rigging systems. At the entrance stands the Muse of Music fountain, carved in 1940 by George Stanley — the same sculptor who designed the Academy Award statuette.

On screen and on record. The Bowl's screen presence is inseparable from its sound.

• The Beatles played here on 23 August 1964 and on 29 and 30 August 1965; the tapes from those nights were eventually released in 1977 as The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, one of the best-known live albums of the era.
• Beaches (1988) closes with the concert sequence staged at the Bowl, and the venue carries the film's final act.
• The Doors (1991) recreated the band's 5 July 1968 Bowl concert on the actual stage, restaging an event that had itself been filmed at the time.
• Long-Haired Hare (1949), the Warner Bros. cartoon in which Bugs Bunny impersonates a conductor and destroys an opera singer, is set in a clearly recognisable animated version of the Bowl — arguably its most-watched appearance of all.

The Bowl also shows up constantly in television and in establishing shots, usually filmed from the upper terraces at dusk with the shell lit and the sky still blue.

What you actually see today. Concerts run from roughly late June through September, with the Fourth of July fireworks programme and the season-closing weekends the hardest tickets. The Bowl's own culture is as distinctive as its music: audiences arrive early to picnic on the grounds and in the box seats, which are furnished with tables, and wine is permitted at Philharmonic-presented events. Bench seating occupies the upper terraces and remains the cheap and honest way in. The free Hollywood Bowl Museum near the main gate holds programmes, instruments and photographs going back to 1922 and is open on concert days and weekday afternoons in season.

Getting there and timing. Parking on site is stacked — cars are packed in and released in order, which means a long wait after the encore — so most regulars use the Park and Ride coaches from lots across the region or the shuttle from the Hollywood/Highland Metro station, both of which drop at the gate. Rideshare drop-off is a walk down Highland. Evenings cool sharply once the sun leaves the canyon, and the marine layer often pushes in after 9pm, so layers matter even in August; regulars bring blankets. Gates open two to four hours before curtain, which is time enough to eat on the grass. For a first visit, a Tuesday or Thursday Philharmonic night is quieter and cheaper than a weekend pop billing, and arriving before sunset gives the view up the canyon that no photograph of the shell alone conveys.