Los Feliz Los Angeles: Griffith Observatory and Village Life

Los Feliz sits at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains in the northeastern corner of Los Angeles's urban core, a neighbourhood of Spanish Colonial and storybook-style homes perched on hillside streets that end abruptly in trails winding up through Griffith Park — the largest urban wilderness park in the United States at more than 4,000 acres. The neighbourhood's position between the mountains and the flatlands gives it a peculiar quality of compression and release: the dense village life of Vermont and Hillhurst Avenues gives way within minutes to the extraordinary solitude of the park's upper trails, where the city below disappears entirely and only the distant hum of traffic reminds hikers that they remain within the second-largest metropolis in America.

The Griffith Observatory, perched on the south slope of Mount Hollywood at 1,134 feet, is the most visited observatory on earth and one of the great achievements of Depression-era civic architecture in America. Its three copper domes and Art Deco detailing have appeared in countless films — most famously James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause and more recently La La Land — but the building's real gift is the free public access to telescopes, planetarium shows and the most spectacular 360-degree view of Los Angeles available from any publicly accessible point. The Zeiss Telescope has been open to the public every clear night since 1935, a civic commitment to stargazing that remains quietly extraordinary for a city known for other kinds of spectacle.

The village life of Los Feliz centres on Vermont and Hillhurst Avenues, where independent bookshops — Skylight Books is among the finest in California — share blocks with vintage clothing stores, coffeehouses and restaurants that have sustained the neighbourhood's identity as an artist and writer's enclave through decades of real estate pressure. The Dresden Restaurant, where Marty and Elayne have performed cocktail jazz since the 1980s, and the Alcove café with its expansive garden patio represent two poles of the neighbourhood's social life, while the Vista Theatre's single-screen vintage cinema maintains the art of moviegoing as a communal ritual.