Los Angeles's Most Iconic Landmarks

Griffith Observatory sits on the southern flank of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park, a copper-domed Art Deco landmark that has drawn Angelenos and visitors up its winding road since 1935. It was funded by the mining magnate Griffith J.

Griffith, who deeded the surrounding land to the city and left money to build a public observatory, insisting that looking through a telescope should be free to all. That founding idea still holds: admission to the building and its telescopes costs nothing.

Inside, the observatory is part science museum and part civic monument.

A Foucault pendulum swings in the central rotunda beneath murals of the heavens, a Tesla coil crackles in the Hall of Science, and the Samuel Oschin Planetarium runs live shows beneath one of the finest domes in the country.

After dark, staff wheel out the historic Zeiss refracting telescope on the roof, and it is said that more people have looked through it than any other telescope on Earth.

The building is as famous for what surrounds it as for what it holds. Its terraces command a sweeping panorama of the Los Angeles basin, the downtown towers, and the Pacific on a clear day, while the Hollywood Sign stands in plain view on the ridge to the west.

Film lovers know the grounds from Rebel Without a Cause, which is commemorated with a bust of James Dean, and more recently from La La Land. It is the rare place that satisfies stargazers, hikers, architecture buffs, and sunset seekers all at once.

Walt Disney Concert Hall crowns Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, a swirl of curving stainless steel designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 2003 as the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Its exterior of shimmering metal petals seems to be caught mid-motion, a piece of frozen music that has become one of the defining images of contemporary Los Angeles and a landmark of twenty-first century architecture.

Behind the dramatic skin lies a room built for sound above all else. Gehry worked with the acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota to shape a warm, enveloping vineyard-style auditorium, where the audience surrounds the orchestra on all sides beneath a sail-like ceiling of Douglas fir.

At the heart of the stage stands a striking pipe organ whose curving wooden pipes, nicknamed the french fries, have become an emblem in their own right.

The hall anchors a stretch of Grand Avenue that has become the city's cultural spine, steps from The Broad and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Its public gardens climb the exterior with a hidden rose-shaped fountain tiled in broken Delft porcelain, and the building rewards a slow walk around its base even without a ticket.

Together with its neighbors, it has helped turn a once-sleepy downtown into a genuine destination for music, art, and design.

Santa Monica Pier juts out over the Pacific at the western edge of the city, a wooden boardwalk that has been a seaside gathering place since the original Municipal Pier opened in 1909.

Its neon-lit entrance archway is one of the most photographed sights on the Southern California coast, and the pier famously marks the symbolic western terminus of Route 66, the historic highway that once carried travelers all the way from Chicago.

The pier's heart is Pacific Park, a compact amusement park whose star attraction is the Pacific Wheel, billed as the world's only solar-powered Ferris wheel, glowing after dark with programmable lights above the waves.

Nearby stands the Looff Hippodrome, a National Historic Landmark that shelters a beautifully restored 1922 carousel, its hand-carved horses turning to organ music just as they did a century ago.

Around these landmarks the pier bustles with anglers dropping lines off the end, street performers, an aquarium tucked beneath the deck, and arcades and food stands spilling the smell of funnel cake into the sea air.

It can feel touristy, and it happily embraces that role, but the setting is genuine California magic: the wide beach, the mountains curving north toward Malibu, and the sun sinking straight into the ocean at day's end.

Los Angeles Union Station opened in 1939 on the edge of downtown, near the old pueblo where the city was born, and is often called the last of the great American railway stations.

Designed principally by the father-and-son architects John and Donald Parkinson, it blends Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival forms with the clean geometry of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne, a combination that could only have come from Southern California.

The soaring main waiting hall is the building's glory: a coffered wood ceiling floats high above travertine walls and a floor patterned in marble and terracotta, while enormous arched windows pour golden light across rows of original high-backed leather-and-wood seats.

Shaded garden patios flank the concourse, planted with palms and fountains, so that even the act of waiting for a train feels like a stroll through a courtyard.

Once nearly forgotten in the age of the automobile, the station has been reborn as the hub of the region's expanding rail network, serving Amtrak, Metrolink commuter trains, and several Metro subway and light-rail lines.

Its unmistakable interiors have appeared in countless films, and a visit rewards anyone who steps inside simply to admire it, whether or not they are catching a train. It stands across from Olvera Street and the historic plaza, tying the modern city back to its origins.

The TCL Chinese Theatre, still known to many as Grauman's Chinese, presides over Hollywood Boulevard with a soaring pagoda facade of red columns, ornate ironwork, and a giant stone dragon, an exuberant fantasy of the Far East as imagined in the 1920s.

The showman Sid Grauman opened it in 1927 with the premiere of Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings, and it has been one of the most famous cinemas on Earth ever since.

Its legend rests on the forecourt, where nearly two hundred film stars have left their handprints, footprints, and signatures in blocks of concrete, a tradition that, by studio lore, began by accident when a star stepped into wet cement.

Visitors wander freely among the slabs, matching their own hands to those of icons from the silent era to the present, and some celebrities added quirks: a set of Groucho Marx's cigar, the hoofprints of Roy Rogers' horse, and the profiles of well-known noses.

The theater remains a working cinema, home to red-carpet premieres and one of the largest IMAX screens in the world behind its historic walls.

It anchors the busy stretch of Hollywood Boulevard where the Walk of Fame's brass stars run along the sidewalks, a district that is loud, crowded, and unapologetically touristy, yet still crackles with the mythology of the movies that built the city's name.

The Broad opened in 2015 on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, a contemporary art museum founded by the philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad to house their remarkable collection and share it with the public for free.

Designed by the firm Diller Scofidio and Renfro, the building is wrapped in a porous white concrete lattice the architects call the veil, which filters daylight into the top-floor galleries.

At its core sits the vault, the opaque concrete mass that stores the collection's overflow and whose sculpted underside shapes the visitor's path.

A tunnel-like escalator bores straight up through it to deposit you in the sky-lit galleries above, a piece of theater that makes the act of moving through the building part of the experience.

Inside hang works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and other leading names in postwar and contemporary art.

The museum's most sought-after draws are the Infinity Mirrored Rooms by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, small chambers lined with mirrors and lights that dissolve into a seemingly endless glittering void, entered one visitor or group at a time.

Together with the neighboring Walt Disney Concert Hall and MOCA, The Broad has helped cement Grand Avenue as the cultural core of a revitalized downtown, drawing crowds to an area that not long ago emptied out after dark.