Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles 1959

In the 1950s, the Hollywood Bowl looked quite different from the familiar venue known today. During this era, the Bowl still featured a sweeping central reflecting pool and decorative fountains positioned between the stage and the audience. These water features were added in the late 1920s and became one of the Bowl’s most recognisable design elements through the mid-century years. They were frequently illuminated for evening performances, sending shimmering reflections up toward the famous concentric bandshell.

Audiences of the period would have experienced the Bowl at a time when summer concerts often felt formal — men in jackets, women in dresses, picnic baskets lined with linen, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at its most glamorous. The fountains and pool softened the distance between audience and performers, evoking the look and mood of European open-air music gardens.

But while beautiful, the water feature wasn’t particularly practical. As the Bowl’s programming expanded to include larger productions, amplified music, pop concerts, and stage equipment, the pond began to limit staging options and occasionally created acoustic complications. By the early 1970s, the fountains and reflecting pool were removed as the venue moved toward the more flexible configuration seen today.

Photographs from the 1950s capture the Bowl at a transitional moment — still elegant, still shaped by romantic design ideals, and not yet transformed into the multipurpose performance space it eventually became. The fountains are long gone, but they remain a beloved chapter in the Bowl’s history, remembered for the way they added movement, light, and a touch of magic to warm Los Angeles summer nights.