Lion’s-Eye View: LA’s New Roar

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The campus isn’t a museum. It’s our home.

It’s where we live, learn, work, worship, and create. It’s where friendships form, ideas take shape, and people arrive not just to visit—but to belong.

Every day, we move through it in a thousand different ways: prospective students and families on tours, alumni retracing their favorite paths, friends here for a game, a lecture, or a performance, people gathering for Mass or a wedding, neighbors walking to the bluff—because let’s be honest—it really is that beautiful. And for many of them, there’s a moment when the visit quietly turns into a memory.

For me, that moment came more than 30 years ago, when I arrived on LMU’s Westchester campus as a new student and walked out to the bluff. The view stopped me in my tracks.

You know the spot—between Hannon Library and McCarthy Hall—where Los Angeles opens up. Ocean to the west. Mountains to the north. The Hollywood Sign and Downtown to the east.

People reach that edge of campus and instinctively slow down. Conversations pause. Campus tours pause for a built-in “wow” moment. Phones come out.

That’s why it felt right to put our new LMU Spirit Mark right there.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s hard to miss: a little over 14 feet tall, bold, and bright red. It’s lit at night, too, which gives the bluff a new presence after dark.

But what I love most is what’s already happening around it.

In the short time it’s been up, the Spirit Mark has become an instant gathering point—one of those places that naturally pulls people together. The photo with this post is a perfect example. We were out there taking pictures for an LMU This Week piece when a group of students wandered over to see what was going on. We invited them in, and suddenly it turned into one of those very LMU moments. (Full disclosure: one of the students is related to me and recognized me, which made it even more fun.)

The setting is so good that photos almost look staged—but that’s just the bluff doing what it always does: making us better.

The Spirit Mark is our way of framing that feeling—LMU’s perch on the edge of the city, and the imagination (and impact) that happens when Lions look out at the world they’re going to change.

So if you haven’t yet, go check it out. Look through the lion. Take in the view. Snap a photo—or grab a quick video and let the wind be the soundtrack.

And if you post it, tag us: @loyolamarymount on Instagram and TikTok.

—John

P.S. One quick “how we got here”: the Spirit Mark (both the visual itself and the bluff installation), along with our updated campus signage, was designed, proposed, and approved in 2019 by President Snyder and the LMU Board of Trustees as part of an integrated visual identity initiative across all three campuses. After pandemic delays, the front signs at the LMU Drive and Loyola Boulevard entrances—and the Spirit Mark—were installed in late 2025, with new signage coming to LMU Playa Vista and LMU Loyola Law School in 2026.