Highland Park & the Arroyo

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Places worth stopping at

With the app in your pocket, you get a note about each one as you walk by.

• Stations & rails4›

  • Heritage Square station

    Heritage Square station on the A Line, named for the museum of rescued Victorian houses next door. Walks start here.

  • Southwest Museum station

    Southwest Museum station, named for the museum on the hill above, closed since 2022. Lummis House and Sycamore Grove Park are a short walk.

  • Santa Fe Arroyo Seco bridge

    The 1896 bridge 56 feet over the Arroyo Seco Parkway is LA's tallest and longest railroad span. A Line trains still cross it.

  • Highland Park station

    Highland Park station, a block from North Figueroa. The Santa Fe depot that stood here was pulled down in 1965.

• Stories2›

  • Lummis House (El Alisal)

    Charles Lummis built his stone house by the Arroyo over 13 years and called it El Alisal, the alder grove. Muir, Sousa and Will Rogers stayed in its guest houses.

  • Mount Washington incline railway

    From 1909 two cable cars climbed Avenue 43 at 4 mph, up to a hotel on the 940-foot summit, built to sell Mount Washington as a hillside suburb.

• Houses & buildings4›

  • Bent-Halstead House

    A 1912 Craftsman with a ranch-house plan decades ahead of its time, built for Ernest Bent, whose family firm built Devil's Gate Dam up the Arroyo.

  • Ziegler Estate

    Half Queen Anne, half Craftsman, 1904. The Southwest Museum's director bought it in the 1950s to add to the museum's grounds.

  • Highland Park Masonic Temple

    The 1923 brick Masonic Temple: Lodge 382 met upstairs for sixty years, until the cost of a quake retrofit forced it out in 1983.

  • Smith Estate (El Mio)

    The 1887 Queen Anne on the hilltop gave its street its name, El Mio. Cult films shot here: Spider Baby in 1964, Insidious: Chapter 2.

• Museums3›

  • Heritage Square Museum

    Houses saved from the wrecking ball: the 1887 Hale House, "the most photographed house" in LA, moved here in 1970; the Palms railroad depot too.

  • Southwest Museum

    Lummis's 1914 museum on the hill, closed since 2022. A tunnel from Museum Drive, once lined with dioramas, still leads to a lift up to the lobby.

  • Los Angeles Police Museum

    LA's oldest surviving police station, 1926, where detectives chased the Hillside Stranglers. A police museum since it closed.

• Art & craft2›

  • Chicken Boy

    Look up: a 22-foot Muffler Man with a chicken's head, made in the 1960s for a fried-chicken stand downtown on Broadway; on Figueroa now.

  • Judson Studios

    Judson Studios has made stained glass since the mid-1890s, here since 1920, still run by the family. Its founder led the Arroyo's Arts and Crafts artists.

• Stage & screen2›

  • Highland Theatre

    The 1925 Highland Theatre closed in 2024, six days short of 100. In 2026 Kristen Stewart said she'd bought it to reopen it.

  • Bob Baker Marionette Theater

    The longest-running puppet theater in the US, founded 1963, moved in 2019 into a 1920s silent movie house on York Boulevard.

• Faith3›

  • Self-Realization Fellowship (Mount Washington)

    Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi, made his headquarters up here in 1925, in a building that opened in 1909 as a hotel.

  • Temple Beth Israel

    The oldest synagogue in Los Angeles still in its original building: Spanish Colonial Revival, 1930, built for $4,078.

  • Pisgah Home

    Faith healer Finis Yoakum's Pisgah Home, early 1900s, tied to the birth of Pentecostalism, has been a mission for over a century.

• Parks & paths2›

  • Debs Park

    Trails in the Montecito Hills with views over the Arroyo Seco to the San Gabriels and downtown. An Audubon Center sits in the park.

  • Arroyo Seco bike path

    Two miles of bike path along the Arroyo Seco channel, under tall sycamores and oaks, from Debs Park past Sycamore Grove to the South Pasadena stables.

Walks

Start a walk in the app and put your phone away. It tells you when you reach each stop.

• Walk

  Heritage Square station → Highland Park station

  12 stops · 5.8 km · 1 hr 40

  Station to station on the A Line: off at Heritage Square for the rescued houses, up the Arroyo past Lummis's house and the incline railway's street, the Southwest Museum, then North Figueroa to…

• Walk

  From Highland Park station: the hills and Garvanza

  7 stops · 4.2 km · 1 hr 15

  A loop from Highland Park station: the 1930 synagogue, El Mio on its hilltop, the police museum, Judson's stained glass in Garvanza, the Pisgah Home and the 1896 railroad bridge.

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