The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in North America
18 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in North America are Mount Rushmore (United States), Space Needle (United States) and Habitat 67 (Canada). The list covers 18 squares, streets and monuments in 3 countries. The United States has the most, with 14. Last updated 13 October 2026.
North America's monuments lean toward the grand gesture: presidents carved into a mountain, a stainless steel arch over the Mississippi, a copper goddess at the gate of New York harbour, needle-thin towers built for world's fairs. Alongside them stand some of the most celebrated viewpoints on Earth, because the continent's national parks were shaped around scenic overlooks from the start, and older streets and ruins reach back to Mesoamerican cities and colonial Quebec.
Teotihuacan near Mexico City lines the Avenue of the Dead with the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, centuries older than the Aztecs who named it. The Statue of Liberty, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi on an iron frame by Gustave Eiffel, was dedicated in 1886. Mount Rushmore in South Dakota carries the faces of four presidents cut into granite under Gutzon Borglum, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington seats Daniel Chester French's statue of Lincoln inside a Doric temple. Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch in St. Louis is as wide at its base as it is tall.
For views from above, Seattle's Space Needle was built for the 1962 World's Fair and Toronto's CN Tower rises over Lake Ontario. Montreal's Habitat 67, Moshe Safdie's stack of concrete modules from Expo 67, reimagined the apartment block. In Yosemite, Tunnel View frames El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall and Half Dome in one sweep, while Glacier Point looks across the valley from above. Zabriskie Point opens on the folded badlands of Death Valley, and Rue du Petit-Champlain winds below the cliffs of old Quebec City.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | United States | |
| 2 | Space Needle | Observation tower | United States | |
| 3 | Habitat 67 | Monument | Canada | |
| 4 | Teotihuacan | Archaeological site | Mexico | ✓ |
| 5 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | United States | ✓ |
| 6 | Zabriskie Point | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 7 | CN Tower | Observation tower | Canada | |
| 8 | Gateway Arch | Monument | United States | |
| 9 | Lincoln Memorial | Monument | United States | |
| 10 | Tunnel View, Yosemite | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 11 | Rue du Petit-Champlain | Pedestrian street | Canada | |
| 12 | Glacier Point | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 13 | Dante's View | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 14 | Artist Point, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 15 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 16 | Cleveland Arcade | Covered passageway | United States | |
| 17 | Toroweap Overlook | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 18 | Salk Institute for Biological Studies building | Monument | United States |
01 Mount Rushmore
United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W
Dean Franklin · Public domain The scale of the physical work is easy to understate. Borglum and his son Lincoln oversaw roughly 400 workers, many of them former miners, over fourteen years from 1927 to 1941. They used dynamite to remove the bulk of the rock, then switched to jackhammers and hand tools for the finer carving, ultimately blasting and chiselling away about 450,000 tons of granite to reveal the faces underneath.
Did you know? The granite is so hard that it is estimated to erode only about one inch every 10,000 years.
02 Space Needle
United States · 3.4 km from Seattle47.620° N 122.349° W
Image by Sebastian_127 from Pixabay The tower was built to withstand winds of 200 mph and very strong earthquakes, and it rode out the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. The saucer at the top held revolving restaurants for decades. A renovation completed in 2018 replaced the observation windows with floor-to-ceiling glass, closer to the original 1962 sketches, and created the Loupe, an indoor deck with a revolving glass floor that looks straight down the structure.
Did you know? The saucer's revolving restaurant was balanced so finely that a single small electric motor of under one kilowatt could turn it.
03 Habitat 67
Canada · 3.2 km from Montreal45.500° N 73.544° W
Image by ifinnsson from Pixabay The complex was built as a pavilion and housing showcase for Expo 67, the World's Fair held in Montreal from April to October 1967. 3 by 3 metres. Combined in different ways, they originally formed 158 apartments, now 146 homes of varying sizes, rising up to twelve storeys. Each home has at least one private garden terrace laid out on the roof of the unit below, and the stacking leaves gaps through which light and views pass between the blocks.
Did you know? Every apartment was originally fitted with a moulded plastic bathroom and a modular kitchen, in keeping with the idea of factory-made housing.
04 Teotihuacan
Mexico · 30.8 km from Zumpango19.692° N 98.844° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordiMA1587 from Pixabay The centre of the site is the Avenue of the Dead, a ceremonial axis more than two kilometres long lined with stepped platforms in the local talud-tablero style, a sloping base topped by a vertical panel that spread across Mesoamerica as a Teotihuacan signature.
Did you know? More than a hundred burials, probably sacrificial and mostly of men accompanied by weapons, were found at the Feathered Serpent temple, dated to around 150–200 CE.
05 Statue of Liberty
United States · 5.5 km from New York City40.689° N 74.044° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by itou365 from Pixabay Bartholdi's first engineer was Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the architect famous for restoring Notre-Dame, and his plan was almost defiantly old-fashioned: fill the statue's interior with sand-packed masonry compartments and let sheer weight keep her standing. Viollet-le-Duc died in 1879 with that plan unfinished, and Bartholdi turned instead to a bridge engineer named Gustave Eiffel — a decade before his tower made him famous.
Did you know? Her torch-bearing arm went on display in Philadelphia in 1876, where visitors could climb to the torch balcony, and her head was shown in Paris in 1878.
06 Zabriskie Point
United States36.420° N 116.811° W
Image by Abhardphoto from Pixabay The hills are the remains of an ancient lake. Between roughly nine and five million years ago a body of water known to geologists as Furnace Creek Lake collected muds, salts, gravel washed from surrounding mountains and ash from volcanic eruptions; these layers, more than 1,500 metres thick in all, make up the Furnace Creek Formation.
Did you know? Manly Beacon honours William L. Manly, who with John Rogers led a stranded party of forty-niners out of Death Valley during the 1849 Gold Rush.
07 CN Tower
Canada · 2.4 km from Toronto43.643° N 79.387° W
Image by jameswheeler from Pixabay Construction started on 6 February 1973. The hexagonal core was cast with a slipform that jacked itself upward as the concrete set, and by early 1974 the tower was already the tallest structure in Canada.
Did you know? The record stair climb, set in 1989 by a police officer, reached the main level in 7 minutes 52 seconds; most climbers take about half an hour.
08 Gateway Arch
United States · 5.1 km from St. Louis38.625° N 90.185° W
Image by Erdenebayar from Pixabay Its shape is not a parabola but a weighted catenary, the curve of a hanging chain turned upside down and made slightly heavier at the feet, so that the forces run down through the legs and straight into the foundations. The architect Eero Saarinen won a nationwide design competition in 1947–48, with structural calculations by Severud Associates.
Did you know? The arch is designed to sway up to 18 inches in either direction and to withstand winds of 150 miles per hour.
09 Lincoln Memorial
United States · 3.6 km from Washington38.889° N 77.050° W
Image by MarkThomas from Pixabay Inside, in a hall open to the air, sits Daniel Chester French's colossal Lincoln, carved from Georgia white marble by the six Piccirilli brothers over four years and shipped in 28 pieces. The president sits in contemplation, gazing east along the Reflecting Pool towards the Washington Monument and the Capitol.
Did you know? Lincoln's only surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, then 78, attended the 1922 dedication, where Black guests were forced into a segregated section.
10 Tunnel View, Yosemite
Tunnel View
United States37.716° N 119.677° W
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay The composition was recognised long before there was a road here. The first picture ever made of Yosemite Valley, a sketch by Thomas Ayres in 1855, was drawn close to where the overlook stands — Artist Point, a traditional painters' vantage, lies only a few hundred metres from the tunnel mouth. But it was Ansel Adams who fixed the view in the modern imagination.
Did you know? The 2008 renovation was the first significant change since 1933, thinning ponderosa pines and incense cedars that had grown up and hidden part of the historic view.
11 Rue du Petit-Champlain
Canada · 4.5 km from Quebec City46.812° N 71.204° W
chensiyuan · CC BY-SA 4.0 The street's buildings stand with their backs against the rock, so that from the west side the cliff rises almost directly behind the rooftops, while the high Château Frontenac looks down from above. Today they house small boutiques, shops and cafés, and in winter, under snow, the lane looks like a picture from another century.
Did you know? In 1688 it was named Rue de Meulles after Jacques de Meulles, intendant of New France, and only later took Champlain's name.
12 Glacier Point
United States37.731° N 119.573° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The spot was used as a lookout long before any road reached it — the Native people of the valley knew the overhanging rock at the edge, though what they called the place is no longer clear. The Four Mile Trail climbed up from the valley in 1872, a stage road for horse-drawn vehicles followed in 1882, and in the early twentieth century the route was rebuilt for automobiles.
Did you know? The last Firefall took place on 25 January 1968, in midwinter with no crowd watching, after the Park Service director ruled it an unnatural spectacle.
13 Dante's View
United States36.221° N 116.726° W
Image by TuendeBede from Pixabay The salt pan is the thing to watch. In flat midday light it is a blinding white sheet laced with the pale threads of dry channels; early and late in the day the ridges throw long shadows across it, and the Panamints on the far side turn copper, then violet. Sunrise is the favourite hour, when the light comes over your shoulder from the east and strikes the western range first while the basin is still in blue shade.
Did you know? The panorama reaches from the Owlshead Mountains about 30 kilometres to the south to the Funeral Mountains some 50 kilometres to the north.
14 Artist Point, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
Artist Point Overlook
United States44.721° N 110.479° W
Bernard Spragg. NZ from Christchurch, New Zealand · CC0 The canyon itself stretches for about 24 miles, and in places is more than a thousand feet deep. Its colours are the product of heat and water rather than paint: the walls are rhyolite, a volcanic rock left by Yellowstone's past eruptions, which hydrothermal activity has cooked and altered. Iron compounds in the rock give the yellows and reds, and their shades depend on how much water they hold — in effect, the canyon is slowly rusting.
Did you know? Its classic V-shaped profile shows that the canyon was cut by the river, not carved by glaciers.
More about Artist Point, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone →
15 Dead Horse Point State Park
United States · 17.7 km from Moab38.506° N 109.733° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay The name comes from a local story. Tradition holds that in the nineteenth century cowboys used the point as a natural corral, since sheer cliffs drop away around it, and that horses left there died of exposure. Whether or not every detail is true, the geography that made such a corral possible is plain to see as the road runs out toward the point.
Did you know? The park received its International Dark Sky Park designation in 2016.
16 Cleveland Arcade
United States · 3.2 km from Cleveland41.500° N 81.690° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay The idea came from Europe. Its architects, John Eisenmann and George H. Smith, looked to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, but they had to solve a very American problem: the plot ran between two avenues that did not line up. Their answer was two nine-storey office blocks, one facing Euclid Avenue and one Superior Avenue, linked by a five-storey arcade.
Did you know? In 2024 DC Studios used the Arcade as a filming location for a scene in the film Superman.
17 Toroweap Overlook
United States36.214° N 113.057° W
John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA · CC BY 2.0 The overlook – also called Tuweep Overlook or Toroweap Point – sits on the remote western North Rim, about 55 miles (89 km) west of the North Rim headquarters as the crow flies but far more by road. Both names come from Southern Paiute: Toroweap is usually glossed as a dry or barren valley, Tuweep as "the earth". The setting explains why a road can reach the brink at all.
Did you know? The cinder cone of Vulcan's Throne, about a mile west of the overlook, is estimated to be roughly 73,000 years old and is cut by the Toroweap Fault.
18 Salk Institute for Biological Studies building
United States · 20.7 km from San Diego32.887° N 117.245° W
Codera23 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, who wanted a building beautiful enough to draw the best scientists in the world. Salk and Kahn persuaded the city of San Diego to grant land on the Torrey Pines mesa, and the March of Dimes paid for the first phase; researchers moved into the first laboratory in 1963.
Did you know? Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was among the eminent scientists who served as consultants when the institute was conceived.
More about Salk Institute for Biological Studies building →
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in North America?
- On our list, Mount Rushmore (United States) ranks first, followed by Space Needle (United States) and Habitat 67 (Canada).
- Which country has the most squares, streets and monuments in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (14), Canada (3) and Mexico (1).
- How tall is the Gateway Arch?
- The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is 630 feet (192 metres) tall and the same distance wide at its base. Designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1965, it is the tallest arch in the world.
- Who built Teotihuacan?
- The city's builders are not known by name; the Aztecs found it already in ruins centuries later and gave it the name Teotihuacan. At its height in the first half of the first millennium AD it was one of the largest cities in the world.
- Who designed Habitat 67?
- The architect Moshe Safdie designed it as a housing experiment for Expo 67 in Montreal. It is built from prefabricated concrete boxes stacked so that each home has its own garden on a neighbour's roof.
- How many squares, streets and monuments are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 18 squares, streets and monuments in 3 countries. The United States has the most, with 14.