Hollywood Walk of Fame With Kids: Is It Worth It?

Quick answer

• It is free, it is a pavement, and it is open 24 hours. There is no ticket, no entrance and no closing time.
• 2,855 stars as of August 2026, along 1.3 miles of Hollywood Boulevard (Gower to La Brea) and 0.4 miles of Vine Street (Yucca to Sunset).
• Go between 7am and 9am. Empty pavements, clean photographs, cheaper parking.
• ⚠️ Agree a price before you photograph a costumed character, or don’t engage at all. This is the number one way visitors get stung.
• Parking: Ovation Hollywood garage, $7.50/hour — but 4 hours for $3 with a TCL Chinese Theatre validation.
• Metro B Line stops directly underneath, at Hollywood/Highland.
• Allow 1–2 hours. It is not a half-day.

I will be honest with you, because most guides to this place are not: the Hollywood Walk of Fame is a pavement.

It is a busy, ordinary city boulevard with brass and terrazzo stars set into the concrete, and if you arrive expecting glamour you will be disappointed within ten minutes. A lot of people are.

And it is still worth going, for reasons I will get to — but the visit works far better if you know that before you arrive, and if you know the handful of practical things that make the difference between a good hour and a bad one.

Here is what it is actually like with children, what to do, what to avoid, and how not to spend sixty dollars on photographs of a tired Spider-Man.

What the Walk of Fame actually is

2,855 stars, as of August 2026, with about thirty new ones added every year.

They run along 1.3 miles of Hollywood Boulevard between Gower Street and La Brea Avenue, and 0.4 miles of Vine Street between Yucca Street and Sunset Boulevard.

Each star is three feet by three feet — a coral-pink terrazzo five-point star rimmed in brass, set into a charcoal terrazzo background. The first permanent star was laid on 28 March 1960.

There are five categories, and each has its own emblem underneath the name:

Emblem	Category
🎥 Film camera	Motion pictures
📺 Television set	Broadcast television
💿 Phonograph record	Audio recording / music
🎙️ Ribbon microphone	Broadcast radio
🎭 Comedy and tragedy masks	Theatre and live performance

Show your children the emblems before you go and the walk becomes a game rather than a walk. Ours spent most of it hunting for the microphone one, which is the rarest of the five and genuinely hard to find.

About ten million people visit every year, which explains the crowds.

How to find one specific star

This is the question that turns the visit from wandering into a hunt, and almost nobody tells you the answer.

The official Walk of Fame site has a free Star Directory and a Star Map. Search a name, and it gives you the address of the star. That is it. No app, no fee.

Do this before you leave the hotel, not while standing on Hollywood Boulevard with a dying phone battery and a child who wants to know where Taylor Swift is.

Practical tip: pick three or four names your children actually care about, look up all of them, and write the addresses down in order along the boulevard so you walk in one direction rather than doubling back. The stars are not in alphabetical, chronological or any other useful order — they are essentially random, and that surprises everyone.

And manage one expectation before you go: the person your child most wants to see may not have a star at all. There are 2,855 stars and rather more than 2,855 famous people.

The costumed characters — read this before you go

This is the single most common way a Walk of Fame visit goes wrong, and it is completely avoidable.

The costumed characters outside the TCL Chinese Theatre are not employed by anyone. They work for tips, and the tips are not optional in practice.

The rules:

• Agree a price before any photograph. Not after. Before.
• Typical expectation is $5–$20 per person — and per person is the part that catches families. A photograph with four characters and three children is not one tip.
• One reported case: $60 handed over to five characters by a visitor who had not agreed anything in advance.
• Do not accept anything offered as free — a CD, a bracelet, a flyer. It will be followed by a request for a donation, and it is much harder to refuse once it is in your child’s hand.

The simplest approach with children is to decide in advance whether you are doing this at all, tell them before you arrive, and then keep walking. If you do want the photograph, it can be a lovely one — just settle the money first, in cash, with one character, and be clear it is for the whole family.

Also avoid: anyone selling studio tour tickets on the boulevard. Buy those directly from the studios’ own websites — the street resellers overcharge.

When to go

Between 7am and 9am. That is the whole answer and it makes more difference than anything else on this page.

• The pavements are nearly empty, so your photographs have the star in them and not eleven strangers’ feet
• It is cooler, which matters a lot in summer on a boulevard with no shade
• Parking is cheaper and easier before 10am
• The costumed characters are mostly not out yet

Second best is a weekday afternoon before 3pm — busier, but the shops are open and parking is still manageable.

Worst: a weekend afternoon or a warm evening. It is genuinely unpleasant with a pushchair.

After dark, stay on the well-lit, busy blocks between Highland and Vine. Keep bags zipped and in front of you — it is a crowded tourist street and pickpocketing happens.

Parking, and the trick that saves you $27

The Ovation Hollywood garage (the mall formerly called Hollywood & Highland) is at 6801 Hollywood Blvd, directly above the busiest and best-known stretch of stars.

The rates:

Standard	$2.50 per 20 minutes, or $7.50 per hour
Daily maximum	$25.00
Valet daily maximum	$35.00
With validation from participating shops	2 hours for $3
With validation from the TCL Chinese Theatre, Hard Rock Cafe, Dave & Buster’s, Lucky Strike, Japan House LA or The Kookaburra Lounge	4 hours for $3

Read that last row again. Four hours of parking for three dollars, in the best-located garage in Hollywood, if you get a validation stamp from one of those places. Buy a coffee and get it stamped. You need one to two hours here — so this is essentially free parking, and it turns a $15 stop into a $3 one.

Note the Dolby Theatre does not validate. If the Dolby tour is the only thing you do, you pay full price.

Garage entrances are from Highland Avenue in front of Loews Hollywood, or from Orange Court between Hollywood Boulevard and Franklin Avenue.

Street meters exist but have a two-hour daily maximum and are hard to find. Not worth the circling.

Getting there without a car

The Metro B Line stops directly underneath Ovation Hollywood, at Hollywood/Highland station. You come up the escalator and you are on the Walk of Fame.

With children this is the better option, especially in the evening — no garage, no traffic on Highland, and the station itself is worth thirty seconds of looking at.

What is free nearby, and what is not

You are here for maybe an hour. These are within a few minutes’ walk, and most of them cost nothing:

Free:

• The TCL Chinese Theatre forecourt — the handprints and footprints in concrete, going back to 1927. You can walk into the forecourt and look at them without a ticket. For most children this is more interesting than the stars, because they can put their own hands in them.
• The Dolby Theatre from outside — where the Oscars are held. The tour costs money; looking does not.
• Ovation Hollywood’s upper terrace — one of the better free views of the Hollywood Sign, and almost nobody goes up there.

Paid, and decide before you go:

• The Dolby Theatre guided tour
• The Madame Tussauds and museum attractions along the boulevard
• Studio tours — book direct with the studio, never on the street

Star ceremonies — free, and hardly anyone knows

When a new star is unveiled, the ceremony is free and open to the public. No ticket.

About thirty happen a year, they are announced in advance on the official Walk of Fame site, and they typically run late morning — around 11:30am.

If your dates happen to line up with one, go. It turns a pavement into an event, you see the actual person, and it costs nothing.

Practical notes: there is a public viewing area, no assigned seating, no chairs or step ladders allowed, and the crowd is cleared immediately afterwards. Arrive early, wear comfortable shoes, bring water and sunscreen. Ceremonies are also streamed live if you cannot be there.

Check the schedule a few days before your trip. It takes one minute and it is the difference between seeing a pavement and seeing a Hollywood ceremony.

Doing it with kids — honestly

Allow one to two hours. Not more. This is a stop, not a day out.

What works:

• Hunting for specific stars with the addresses written down in advance
• The five emblems as a spotting game
• The handprints at the Chinese Theatre, which are hands-on in a way the stars are not
• Being able to say they walked on it

What to expect:

• No shade, and the pavement radiates heat. Water, hats, and go early.
• It is crowded from late morning onward
• The boulevard is grubby in places and there are people in visible distress on some blocks. Decide in advance how you will handle a child asking about that — it is a real part of the experience and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
• Pushchairs are fine but slow going in the crowds

So is it worth it?

Yes, for about ninety minutes, if you go early and know what you are walking into.

No, if you are travelling across Los Angeles specially for it, or expecting glamour, or going on a Saturday afternoon in August.

The way to do it: arrive at 8am, park for $3 with a validation, find four stars you actually care about, put your hands in the concrete at the Chinese Theatre, go up to the terrace for the Hollywood Sign view, and be gone by ten.

Done that way it is one of the better free mornings in Los Angeles. Done badly it is the thing people complain about for the rest of the trip.

Where we stayed

We stayed at The Biltmore Los Angeles in downtown, about twenty minutes from Hollywood depending on traffic.

Some links below are affiliate links. If you book through them we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Internal link: our stay at The Biltmore Los Angeles

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What else to do the same day

Griffith Observatory is fifteen minutes up the hill and is the natural pairing — free, and the two together make a genuinely good Hollywood day. Do the Walk of Fame at 8am and the Observatory in the evening, and you have bookended a day with the two best free things in this part of the city.

Internal links:

Griffith Observatory with kids

Venice Beach and downtown in a day

our full Los Angeles guide