CARL DE SOUZA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

On Aug. 8, 1969, less than one month after Neil Armstrong made one giant leap for mankind, the Beatles took a few steps outside the recording studio where they were working on their penultimate album and turned a quiet road into one of the most famous streets in London. The group spent 15 minutes to shoot the album cover –- an image that has been reproduced countless times since.

From the BBC:

The idea for the cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album was initially to call it Everest, after the favorite brand of cigarettes smoked by their engineer Geoff Emerik. Then the thought of doing a Himalayan cover helped kill the idea, and instead they considered doing [the] shoot closer to home. “There’s a sketch Paul McCartney did with four little stick men crossing the Zebra,” says Brian Southall, author of the history of Abbey Road Studios.

In the album photo, the Beatles appear to be walking across a quiet London street. But it is actually quite a busy intersection. Abbey Road Studios now has a Web cam focused on the zebra striped crosswalk, showing all manner of people stopping for photo ops, while disrupting the flow of traffic.