Griffith Observatory

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Griffith Observatory has admitted visitors free of charge since the 14th of May 1935. That was no accident; it was the explicit instruction of the man who paid for it. Griffith J. Griffith left directions in his will: build an observatory, build it for the public, and keep it free. He believed anyone should be able to look through a telescope, not just researchers in remote mountain facilities. More than 9 million people have since taken him at his word. They have peered through the 12-inch Zeiss refracting scope on the roof, making it the most viewed telescope in the world. The building occupies the south-facing slope of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. From its terraces, the view stretches southeast to Downtown Los Angeles and southwest to the Pacific Ocean. What drove a private citizen to give away 3,015 acres of land and fund this place? And how did one man's vision for public astronomy turn a hillside into an international landmark?

• 2. The Benefactor's Vision

  ›

  On the 16th of December 1896, Griffith donated the land to the City of Los Angeles. That gift predated the observatory's construction by more than three decades and established what became Griffith Park. His written specifications for the building drew on two of the era's leading astronomers. He consulted Walter Sydney Adams, who would later serve as director of Mount Wilson Observatory. He also worked with George Ellery Hale, who had co-founded, with Andrew Carnegie, the first astrophysical telescope in Los Angeles. Their involvement lent the project scientific credibility to match its populist aims. Griffith's conviction was that observatories should not be locked away on remote mountaintops, reserved only for specialists. His will also directed funds toward an exhibit hall and a planetarium. Those precise instructions would guide the architects when ground finally broke in 1933.

• 3. Construction and First Years

  ›

  On the 20th of June 1933, ground broke for the observatory on a design by architects John C. Austin and Frederic M. Ashley. Their plans drew on preliminary sketches by Russell W. Porter. The finished structure combined Greek and Beaux-Arts architectural styles with Moderne influences; the exterior is embellished with the Greek key pattern. In its first five days of operation, the observatory logged more than 13,000 visitors. Dinsmore Alter served as director during those first years. Among the opening exhibits was a Foucault pendulum, designed to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. A triple-beam coelostat occupied the west dome, projecting images of the Sun. A thirty-eight-foot relief model of the moon's north polar region gave visitors a sense of lunar geography. At Griffith's request, the original design also included an evolution exhibit. It was realized as the Cosmochron, which featured a narration by Caltech Professor Chester Stock and an accompanying slide show. The Cosmochron ran from 1937 until the mid-1960s. Beneath the large central dome, the planetarium screened early programs on the Moon, the planets, and eclipses. That dome would soon prove useful in ways Griffith never anticipated.

• 4. Pilots and Astronauts

  ›

  During World War II, the observatory's planetarium was turned to a military purpose: training pilots in celestial navigation. The same facility served again in the 1960s. Astronauts preparing for the Apollo program's first lunar missions came to the observatory to train. A building designed to bring the cosmos to ordinary visitors had become a classroom for people preparing to leave the Earth.

• 5. The Million Volt Oscillator

  ›

  The Tesla coil on display at the observatory, labeled GPO-1, is one of a pair built in 1910 by Earle Ovington. Ovington ran a company that built high-voltage generators for medical X-ray and electrotherapy devices. His public demonstrations of those generators drew crowds. Ovington aimed to surpass a device built by Elihu Thomson in 1893, which had generated a 64-inch spark. Tesla himself had secretly produced much larger sparks in 1899, but that record was not public. An official from the Edison Electric Illuminating Company offered $1,000 to display the machine at an electrical show at Madison Square Garden. The condition: sparks had to reach at least ten feet. The machine was installed in the band balcony overlooking the arena and dubbed the Million Volt Oscillator. At the top of each hour, the lights in the main hall were shut off. Sparks shot from the copper ball atop the coil to a matching coil 122 inches away, or to a wand held by an assistant. The chief engineer of the General Electric Company estimated the discharges at 1.3 million volts. Ovington died in 1936, giving the pair of coils to his colleague Frederick Finch Strong. Strong donated them to Griffith Observatory in 1937. The observatory had room for only one of the two. Observatory staffer Leon Hall restored the machine with help from Kenneth Strickfaden. Strickfaden was a Hollywood special effects designer who had built the electrical effects for Frankenstein in 1931.

• 6. The Big Picture

  ›

  Mounted on the north wall of the Depths of Space Hall, the largest astronomical image in the world measures 150 feet by 20 feet. It was photographed over 11 nights using the 48-inch Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Mountain. The image shows a portion of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies at an angular scale of 0.1 degree per foot. A bronze statue of Albert Einstein sits on a bench nearby. He holds his index finger about one foot in front of his eyes, illustrating the precise area of space captured in the photograph behind him. Out on the front lawn, a different kind of monument predates the observatory's opening. The Astronomers Monument was a 1934 New Deal project created by six local artists. It honors Hipparchus, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and William Herschel. An armillary sphere tops the sculpture. Hipparchus, the oldest figure honored, is estimated to have lived from around 190 to around 120 BC.

• 7. On Screen

  ›

  Rebel Without a Cause, released in 1955, used the observatory in two separate sequences. Those scenes helped establish the building as an international emblem of Los Angeles. A bust of actor James Dean was subsequently placed at the west side of the grounds. Films have returned to the observatory ever since. The Terminator used it in 1984. Back to the Future arrived in 1985, followed four years later by Back to the Future Part II. La La Land appeared on its terraces in 2016. In total, the building has featured in more than forty film productions across eight decades. The list runs from The Phantom Empire in 1935 to Family Switch in 2023. Television productions have been equally frequent, from Mission: Impossible in 1966 to recent series including Fallout and BoJack Horseman. Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band named a song for it in 1974. 2Pac referenced it in "To Live & Die in L.A." The Beatles recorded Anthology interviews at the observatory in the mid-1990s. Linkin Park performed there during the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. Video games including Grand Theft Auto V and Horizon Forbidden West have recreated it as a digital Los Angeles landmark. On the 6th of January 2002, the observatory closed for renovation. For the first time since 1935, it was unavailable to the public and to the film crews that had used it for decades.

• 8. Renovation and Renewal

  ›

  The reopening on the 2nd of November 2006, followed a $93 million renovation funded largely by a public bond issue. The work preserved the building's Art Deco exterior while expanding it underground. New additions included a cafe, a gift shop, and the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater. The aging planetarium dome was also replaced. On the 25th of May 2008, the observatory offered visitors live coverage of the Phoenix spacecraft landing on Mars. Ed Krupp has served as the observatory's director since 1974. His 52-year tenure encompasses the updating of nearly every technology and exhibit in the building. The Griffith Observatory Foundation was chartered in 1978 as Friends of the Observatory. It was co-founded by Debra Griffith and Harold Griffith, the grandson of the original benefactor, alongside Ed Krupp. The renovation also added the Cafe at the End of the Universe. Named as a tribute to Restaurant at the End of the Universe, it is run by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. The Cosmic Connection, a 150-foot hallway linking the main building to the underground exhibits, dramatizes the history of the universe. It does so using hundreds of individual pieces of astronomy-related jewelry.