Santa Monica

The episode

Places worth stopping at

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

• The pier2›

  • Santa Monica Pier

    The long, narrow pier opened in 1909 to carry sewer pipes past the breakers, with nothing on it. The fun came in 1916, on Looff's wide pier alongside.

  • Pacific Park

    No gate to pay at: Pacific Park is LA County's only admission-free amusement park, and its Ferris wheel runs on solar power.

• Parks & beach3›

  • Original Muscle Beach

    The US fitness boom started on this sand in 1934, on equipment the WPA put in. Jack LaLanne trained here; it is still a gymnastics area.

  • Palisades Park

    A park on a crumbling cliff: 1.6 miles of bluff-top lawn since 1892. The barriers are there because the bluffs are prone to slides.

  • Tongva Park

    Tongva Park, named for LA's first people. Find Morty, the big Moreton Bay fig, and the Three Amigos: fig trees of 100 tons each, moved here.

• Public art5›

  • Saint Monica statue

    The city's namesake in cast cement, dedicated in 1935, a New Deal work. Gutzon Borglum of Mount Rushmore came to help his friend Morahan finish her.

  • Gestation III

    Step inside the wooden ring: on the winter solstice the sun sets dead centre in its slit, and a small crowd comes to watch. Baile Oakes, 1990.

  • Arcadia Bandini de Baker

    The bronze is Arcadia Bandini de Baker, "Godmother of Santa Monica": she gave the land for this park, which she named Linda Vista.

  • Head of David Lynch

    Watch the steel strips turn: a 21-foot head of David Lynch by David Černý, rotating silently, day and night, since 2024.

  • Chain Reaction

    The mushroom cloud is made of chain: Paul Conrad's 1991 peace monument. Joan Kroc secretly paid for it; read the line at its base.

• Stories6›

  • Looff Hippodrome & carousel

    Step into the 1916 Hippodrome: the carousel scenes of The Sting were filmed here. The building is a National Historic Landmark, one of the last of the old pier.

  • McClure Tunnel

    PCH dives into the bluff here. The first tunnel was a railway's, bored for trains to the Long Wharf; Edison filmed the ride through it in 1898.

  • Mayfair Music Hall (the 1910 opera house)

    This was the 1910 Santa Monica Opera House, later the Mayfair, where Young Frankenstein filmed "Puttin' on the Ritz". The 1994 quake gutted it; it's a shop now.

  • Brother Studios (the Beach Boys' studio)

    1454 Fifth Street was Brother Studios, the Beach Boys' own studio, opened in 1974 by Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson. Elton John recorded here.

  • RAND headquarters

    RAND, the Cold War think tank, is headquartered here: spun off from Douglas Aircraft in 1948, its research shaped US policy from the space race on.

  • The Inkwell (Bay Street Beach)

    The Inkwell: in the Jim Crow years this beach by Bay Street was one of the few in California open to Black people. Santa Monica recognized it in 2008.

• Buildings11›

  • The Georgian Hotel

    The Georgian, an eight-storey Art Deco hotel of 1933. In Prohibition it hid a speakeasy in the basement, since restored.

  • The Eden (the old Shangri-La)

    The white Streamline Moderne block opened in 1940 as the Shangri-La, named for Lost Horizon. In the war the Army Air Forces used it as a rehab centre.

  • Fairmont Miramar

    Senator Jones, who co-founded the city, built his Miramar mansion here in 1889. King Gillette of the safety razor bought it; Greta Garbo lived in the hotel.

  • El Miro Theater

    Only the Art Deco front is original: the 1934 El Miro was a 900-seat movie palace, rebuilt behind its facade in 1989 and closed in 2024.

  • Clock Tower Building

    Look up at the zigzags: the 1930 Clock Tower was Santa Monica's tallest building for about 40 years, by Walker & Eisen in white-stone Art Deco.

  • Santa Monica Civic Auditorium

    Welton Becket's 1958 Civic: 3,000 seats, and a main floor that tilts by hydraulics from flat for dancing to raked for a show.

  • Hotel Casa del Mar

    A 1926 beach club, then wartime troop housing, Synanon's base from 1967 and the Pritikin Longevity Center; a hotel again since 1999.

  • Horatio West Court

    Six white cubes on a 60-foot lot: Irving Gill's 1919 Horatio West Court, the first building in Santa Monica on the National Register.

  • Edgemar

    Frank Gehry's Edgemar wraps a 1908 ice warehouse and a dairy's Art Deco office, where eggs were once held to the light to check them.

  • Merle Norman Building

    The streamline tower is the 1936 headquarters of Merle Norman Cosmetics, rising over low Main Street in the depths of the Depression.

  • Parkhurst Building

    Look up for the gargoyles and the octagonal tower: Parkhurst Building, 1927, built for a mayor of Venice just over the line, here in Santa Monica.

• Small museums3›

  • Heal the Bay Aquarium

    Under the pier, by the sand: Heal the Bay's small aquarium. In 2009 its octopus worked a drain valve loose and flooded the visitor space.

  • Camera Obscura

    A camera obscura from 1899, moved up to the bluff and housed here since 1955. It is free to visit, but the building has stayed shut since 2020.

  • California Heritage Museum

    The museum is a house that moved: Roy Jones's 1890s home, rolled here from Ocean Avenue in 1977. Shows on surfing, skateboarding and Native California.

• Streets & shops2›

  • Third Street Promenade

    Three blocks of Third Street went car-free in 1965 as the Santa Monica Mall; the street had been the town's business centre since the 1870s-80s.

  • ZJ Boarding House

    ZJ Boarding House, the surf shop since 1988, is the one behind the yearly Halloween contest: surfers catching waves in costume.

Walks

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

• Walk

  The pier and the bluff

  11 stops · 3.1 km · 1 hr 15

  From the pier up onto the bluff and north through Palisades Park: the tunnel, the camera obscura, the old hotels, Saint Monica and the solstice sculpture.

• Walk

  Pier to the Promenade

  10 stops · 3.8 km · 1 hr

  From the pier past Chez Jay and Tongva Park to Chain Reaction, then up Third Street Promenade to the Beach Boys' studio and David Lynch's turning head.

• Walk

  Pier to Main Street

  13 stops · 4.2 km · 1 hr 15

  South from the pier along the beach to the Inkwell and the Casa del Mar, past RAND and the Civic, then down Main Street to the Venice line.

More of Los Angeles

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