City preview · Greater Los Angeles
Los Angeles is more than freeways: a hilltop observatory faces both stars and basin, asphalt still bubbles beneath a central lawn, towers rise from a backyard, and an 1893 light well keeps playing the future on screen.
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01 · Griffith Observatory
The observatory looks toward the stars and back across the entire Los Angeles Basin.
Griffith Observatory opened in 1935 as a public astronomy institution and quickly became one of the city’s best places to look back at itself. White domes face the sky; terraces face the basin.
Source: Wikipedia
02 · La Brea Tar Pits and Museum
Beneath this lawn, natural asphalt is still bubbling toward the surface.
La Brea Tar Pits is Los Angeles’s most direct underground time machine. Natural asphalt seeped upward and trapped mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and other Ice Age animals over tens of thousands of years.
Source: Wikipedia
03 · Watts Towers Arts Center
One person spent more than 30 years lifting a backyard into the sky without plans or sponsors.
Simon Rodia began Watts Towers around 1921, building steel, mortar, tile, shells, and broken glass into high spires.
Source: Wikipedia
04 · Bradbury Building
The future in Blade Runner is an 1893 office building.
The Bradbury Building was completed in 1893. Its exterior is quiet; the event is inside, where a five-story court, iron stairs, open cage elevators, and a skylight pull daylight all the way to the floor.
Source: WikipediaAll images on this page are City Whisper editorial illustrations, not historical photographs, news photographs, or evidence.
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