Griffith Observatory

Story

Griffith J. Griffith shot his wife in 1903, served two years in prison, and then tried to give Los Angeles a public observatory. The city refused his money for over a decade. When he died in 1919, his will forced the issue — and the observatory that opened on May 14, 1935, has charged no admission since its first day, exactly as he demanded. Over 9 million people have looked through the 12-inch Zeiss refracting telescope in the east dome, making it the most-used public telescope on Earth. Most of those visitors never notice what's directly above them in the Central Rotunda.

Hugo Ballin spent years on the ceiling murals up there — eight allegorical figures representing the atoms of the universe, surrounded by the signs of the zodiac and the pantheon of astronomers. Ballin finished them in 1934, a full year before the building opened, and they were restored during the $93 million renovation that brought the observatory back in November 2006. The restoration is thorough enough that the paint reads fresh, which makes it easy to dismiss the murals as decorative. They are not decorative. Each figure is a thesis about humanity's place in the cosmos, rendered in the visual language of Beaux-Arts allegory at the exact moment that language was going out of fashion. Below them, the Foucault pendulum swings in its slow arc, knocking over pegs as the Earth rotates beneath it — the same demonstration visitors encountered on opening day in 1935, still running, still correct.