Above the City of Angels

Originally published on 10/21/22

“LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

It’s true, Los Angeles is a jungle. One great, big, concrete jungle where people come from all around to try and “make it” in the land of fancy coffee and hipster food. Personally, I don’t care for much of LA. The traffic’s bad, the weather’s the same, and most of the tourist attractions are just that: tourist attractions designed to bleed you dry. True, most of LA is a jungle but just like any jungle out of all the darkness, there’s always something bound to impress.

Located on a prime spot towards the top of Griffith Park, the Griffith Observatory was formally opened to the public in the spring of 1935. Throughout the decades, the observatory has seen it all, from the second world war, doomsday predictions, mankind’s first steps on the moon, and record-breaking crowds to view comets passing by. In May of 2020, the observatory celebrated its 85th birthday under a cloud of anxiety during the early stages of the Coronavirus pandemic before finally reopening in the summer of 2021.

For me, the Griffith holds a special place in my heart. For years growing up, my grandmother took my cousins, my sister, and I all over SoCal every summer for a week she used to call “Camp Grandma.” For all the botanical gardens, old Spanish missions, and the hours spent at “educational” stops like Kidseum over in Pasadena, there were trips to mind-blowing places like the LA Natural History Museum, thought-provoking places like the Autry Museum of the American West, and incredible places like the Griffith Observatory.

I remember visiting for the first time around 2007 shortly after the observatory underwent a multimillion dollar renovation. I remember seeing the Hollywood Sign for the first time, the Foucault pendulum in the lobby, and displays that calculated your weight on other planets in relation to earth. There’s even a wall with samples (sealed off obviously), of the entire periodic table inside for the super nerdy. To be fair though, as cool as it was to visit as a kid I was really too young to truly appreciate everything there is to see and experience and because we used to drive up with Grandma during the summer we’d have to leave by 2pm in order to beat the LA rush hour or we’d never get back to Orange County. Instead, for the next 15 years I would stare at pictures of the observatory and remember how much I wanted to watch the sunset, look through the big telescope and stare out at the lights of LA. On a good day, you can see out over Hollywood, Los Feliz, all the way to downtown, Century City, and sometimes even all the way out to the Westside.

Finally, this September I went back to the observatory and did just that. Like my earlier visits, it’s still best to park down by the Greek Theatre and ride the Los Feliz DASH up the hill. As of right now, the bus fare is free though I should mention, this only works when there isn’t a concert at the Greek.

After 15 years, and a letdown last year, I finally got to watch the sun set from the roof and stare through the original Zeiss telescope and even better? I got to view the rings of Saturn. Look, I know to most people, staring through a telescope isn’t something to write home about, let alone almost a thousand words. But I got to live out a childhood dream that night and view Saturn through not only the same telescope I used to dream about, but the same telescope installed at the observatory in 1935 and that’s pretty cool.

Anyway, after my turn in the dome, I headed back onto the roof and stared out at the lights of LA for a while. I actually posted this photo as part of a set on Instagram that same night, but I’m writing this because I wanted to go into a longer, more detailed form about that image. I didn’t really put a whole lot of thought into it, in fact I just sort of ballparked some camera settings, took a risk just setting it down on the ledge and letting 15 seconds of shutter time do its thing. Personally, I really like it. I know its not my “best” work, or even the best photo of LA ever, even that little snapshot stands for 15 years of dreaming high above the City of Angels.