Los Angeles: Hollyhock House & Griffith Observatory

After our visit to Hollyhock House*, the Frank Lloyd Wright House in Los Angeles, our host drove us to the Griffith Observatory and dropped us off to explore. The building was erected in 1934 and renovated in the early 2000s. We watched Leonard Nimoy narrate a short documentary about the process of lifting the whole thing off its foundation so they could dig two floors down to expand their display space-!

The original murals depicting the zodiac, planets, and figures from the history of science in the central rotunda were restored. (You can't really see it from here, but they're pretty trippy.) The long ramp down to the lower floors is now flanked by a delightful collage of star- and moon-themed jewelry artfully arranged below a timeline from the Big Bang, represented below, to the present day.

"If all mankind could look through that telescope, it would change the world." ~Griffith J. Griffith (1850-1919) While looking up his life/death dates, I discovered that the Observatory omitted to tell us the other reason Griffith is (in)famous: shooting his wife in 1903! Miraculously, she survived, losing her right eye, and winning a divorce and custody of their teen-aged son while he served 2 years in San Quentin State Prison and received treatment for his "alcoholic insanity."

We had a lot of fun here. Above left is a piece of moon rock. We got a docent to explain to us why only one side of the moon faces the earth (it's due to gravitational pull). We played with a globe of Jupiter that recreated the "red spot." We weighed ourselves on scales titrated for the different planets. Above right is a display of elements. I'm pointing out the fact that "we are star dust and to the universe we will return" (Credit: Period Pastor).

Left, we got to explore the terraces while there was still sunlight; right, the Observatory from Hollyhock House. We purchased tickets for a planetarium show about Vikings and the aurora borealis called "Light of the Valkyries" set to the music of Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." It had a live narrator and graphics that only got kind of cheesy at the end. it was neat. 

Afterward we wandered around the exhibits waiting for the sun to set so we could look through the telescope. When we went up at dusk, however, the line was verrrrrrrrrrry long. We were hungry, but not for what the cafeteria was offering, so we took the bus down the hill to an ice cream shop before calling a Lyft home.

*Unfortunately, I waited too long to get tickets for the guided tour that would have allowed us to take photographs, as at the other Frank Lloyd Wright properties we have visited (Taliesin, Oak Park, Fallingwater, Polymath Park).


Editor's Note: Check out our other Los Angeles posts on the La Brea Tar Pits and the Santa Monica Pier.