The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in the United States
14 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful squares, streets and monuments in the United States are Mount Rushmore, Space Needle and Statue of Liberty. The list covers 14 squares, streets and monuments. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The United States has made its grandest public monuments out of two things: national symbols and national scenery. Sculptors and engineers raised colossal statues, arches and memorials to the founding ideas of the republic, while the National Park Service, from its early years, built roads and trails to the overlooks where the country's canyons, valleys and deserts look most dramatic.
The Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886 at the entrance to New York harbour, has a copper skin over an iron frame by Gustave Eiffel. Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota carries the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln cut into granite. The Lincoln Memorial sets Daniel Chester French's seated Lincoln inside a Doric temple, and its steps were where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch in St. Louis and Seattle's Space Needle bring the mid-century to the list, and the Cleveland Arcade of 1890 covers a Victorian shopping street with a glass roof.
The viewpoints are just as varied. Tunnel View and Glacier Point look over Yosemite Valley, one from its entrance and one from high above. Zabriskie Point and Dante's View overlook the badlands and salt flats of Death Valley, Artist Point frames the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone in a canyon of yellow rock, and Dead Horse Point looks down on a tight bend of the Colorado River in Utah.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | |
| 2 | Space Needle | Observation tower | |
| 3 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | ✓ |
| 4 | Zabriskie Point | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 5 | Gateway Arch | Monument | |
| 6 | Lincoln Memorial | Monument | |
| 7 | Tunnel View, Yosemite | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 8 | Glacier Point | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 9 | Dante's View | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 10 | Artist Point, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 11 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 12 | Cleveland Arcade | Covered passageway | |
| 13 | Toroweap Overlook | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 14 | Salk Institute for Biological Studies building | Monument |
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 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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 →
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
14 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 the United States?
- On our list, Mount Rushmore ranks first, followed by Space Needle and Statue of Liberty.
- How long did it take to carve Mount Rushmore?
- Work under the sculptor Gutzon Borglum ran from 1927 to 1941, and much of the rock was removed with dynamite before finishing by hand. Each of the four faces is about 18 metres high.
- Why is it called Dead Horse Point?
- According to legend, cowboys used the narrow neck of the mesa as a natural corral, and a group of wild horses left there died of thirst within sight of the Colorado River far below.
- Where did Martin Luther King Jr. give the "I Have a Dream" speech?
- He delivered it from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963, during the March on Washington. The spot is marked by an inscription on the steps.
- How many squares, streets and monuments are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 14 squares, streets and monuments.