One of L.A.'s primary cultural destinations is the Bergamot Arts Station. Home to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, this campuslike complex is a hugely popular destination for visitors from around the w...

In the first decades of the 20th century, Boyle Heights was inhabited by Jewish immigrants, who have since migrated west to the Fairfax district and beyond. They left behind the oldest orthodox synago...

This small museum is both a celebration of individual African Americans and a living showplace of contemporary culture. The best exhibits are temporary and touch on themes as varied as the human exper...

A $130-million renovation -- reinvention, actually -- has turned the former Museum of Science and Industry into Exposition Park's most popular attraction. Using high-tech sleight of hand, the center s...

Opened in 1956, this 13-story tower, just north of the legendary intersection of Hollywood and Vine, is one of the city's most recognizable buildings. The world's first circular office building is oft...

Completed in September 2002 at a cost of $163 million and built to last 500 years, this ultracontemporary cathedral is one of L.A.'s newest architectural treasures and the third-largest cathedral in t...

Many Chinese settled in this once-rural area during the second half of the 19th century. Today, most Angelenos of Chinese descent are well integrated into the city's suburbs; few can be found living i...

Built in 1924, this is Beverly Hills's oldest house of worship. In 1950, Elizabeth Taylor and her first husband, Nicky Hilton, were married here. The funerals of Alfred Hitchcock, Gary Cooper, Eva Gab...

Built in 1928, the 27-story triangular Los Angeles City Hall was the tallest building in the city for more than 30 years. The structure's distinctive ziggurat roof was featured in the film War of the ...

This gallery, housed in a prominent Museum Row building, has grown into one of the city's largest. "Craft and folk art" encompasses everything from clothing, tools, religious artifacts, and other ever...

Camellias -- evergreen flowering shrubs from China and Japan -- were the passion of amateur gardener E. Manchester Boddy, who began planting them here in 1941. Today his 160-acre Descanso Gardens cont...

El Alisal is a small, rugged, two-story "castle," built between 1889 and 1910 from large rocks and telephone poles purchased from the Santa Fe Railroad. The architect and creator was Charles F. Lummis...

This historic district was built in the 1930s on the site where the city was founded, as an alternative to the razing of a particularly unsightly slum. The result is a contrived nostalgic fantasy of t...

Now entering its eighth decade, the original market was little more than a field with wood stands set up by farmers during the Depression so they could sell directly to city dwellers. Eventually, perm...

God bless Frederick Mellinger, inventor of the push-up bra (originally known as the Rising Star). Frederick's of Hollywood opened this world-famous purple-and-pink Art Deco panty shop in 1947 and duti...

Frank Lloyd Wright's Freeman House, built in 1924, was designed as an experimental prototype of mass-produced affordable housing. The home's richly patterned "textile-block" exterior was Wright's inve...

This is one of the world's great movie palaces and one of Hollywood's finest landmarks. The theater was opened in 1927 by impresario Sid Grauman, a brilliant promoter who's credited with originating t...

Made world-famous in the film Rebel Without a Cause, Griffith Observatory's bronze domes have been Hollywood Hills landmarks since 1935. Most visitors don't actually go inside; they come to this spot ...

Mining tycoon Col. Griffith J. Griffith donated these 4,107 acres to the city in 1896 as a Christmas gift. Today Griffith Park is the largest urban park in America. There's a lot to do here, including...

Initially intended to be a cornerstone of Hollywood Boulevard renewal, this 33,000-square-foot facility was plagued by internal politicking and faulty architecture long before it opened in 1996. Once ...

When the Hollywood honchos realized how limited the footprint space was at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre, they came up with another way to pay tribute to the starts. Since 1960, more than 2,000 celebr...

The Huntington Library is the jewel in Pasadena's crown. The 207-acre hilltop estate was once home to industrialist and railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927), who bought books on the same m...

Since opening in 1997, the Richard Meier-designed Getty Center has quickly assumed its place in the L.A. landscape (literally and figuratively) as the city's cultural acropolis and international mecca...

Located in an architecturally acclaimed modern building in Little Tokyo, this soaring 85,000-square-foot pavilion -- designed by renowned architect Gyo Obata -- is a private nonprofit institute create...

Here's something you probably didn't know: There are more Koreans in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the world outside of Korea -- some 100,000. If you drive down Western Avenue between Olympic and ...

This is one of L.A.'s early architectural achievements and the third-largest library in the United States. The city rallied to save the library when arson nearly destroyed it in 1986; the triumphant r...

An odorous swamp of gooey asphalt oozes to the earth's surface in the middle of Los Angeles. No, it's not a low-budget horror-movie set -- it's the La Brea Tar Pits, a truly bizarre primal pool on Mus...

The neighborhood around tiny Leimert Park is becoming a center of African-American artistic life and historical focus. It features galleries, restaurants, and shops filled with local crafts and Africa...

Like nearby Chinatown, this redeveloped ethnic neighborhood isn't home to the majority of Angelenos of Japanese ancestry; suburban Gardena has that distinction. But Little Tokyo functions as the commu...

For more than 50 years the LACMA has been one of the finest art museums in the nation, housing a 110,000-piece collection that includes works by Degas, Rembrandt, Hockney, and Monet. The huge complex ...

The L.A. Zoo, which shares its parking lot with the Museum of the American West, has been welcoming visitors and busloads of school kids since 1966. In 1982, the zoo inaugurated a display of cuddly ko...

In the late 18th century, Franciscan missionaries established 21 missions up the California coast, from San Diego to Sonoma. Each uniquely beautiful mission was built 1 day's trek from the next, along...

Founded in 1771, Mission San Gabriel Arcangel retains its original facade, notable for its high oblong windows and large capped buttresses said to have been influenced by the cathedral in Cordova, Spa...

Los Angeles is the only major city in the world divided by a mountain range, and the road on top of this range is the famous Mulholland Drive. It travels 21 miles along the peaks and canyons of Hollyw...

MOCA is Los Angeles's only institution devoted to art from 1940 to the present. Displaying works in a variety of media, it's strong in works by Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Mark Rothko, and shows are...

Want to see the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show (1964), or Edward R. Murrow's examination of Joseph McCarthy (1954), or Arnold Palmer's victory in the 1958 Masters Tournament, or listen to radio excer...

Located north of Downtown in Griffith Park, this is one of the country's finest and most comprehensive museums of the American West. More than 78,000 artifacts showcasing the history of the region wes...

The Museum of Tolerance is designed to expose prejudices, bigotry, and inhumanity while teaching racial and cultural tolerance. Since its opening in 1993, it's hosted 4 million visitors from around th...

The "Fighting Dinosaurs" are not a high school football team, but the trademark symbol of this massive museum: Tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops skeletons poised in a stance so realistic that every ki...

According to a security guard, John Wayne and Redd Foxx once got into a fight here after Wayne refused to ride in the same limo as Foxx, who called the movie star a "redneck." Well, your NBC tour will...

Named for a food-packing king and financier who reorganized the failing Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Simon displays one of the finest private collections of European, American, and Asian ...

This has long been one of L.A.'s most colorful areas and a must-visit for any first-time tourist. Founded at the turn of the last century, Venice was a development inspired by its Italian namesake. Au...

The most striking aspect of this museum is the building itself. Designed in the 1920s in Chinese Imperial Palace style, it's rivaled in flamboyance only by Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Rota...

The bold architecture and overwhelming scale of the Pacific Design Center, designed by Argentinean architect Cesar Pelli, aroused controversy when it was erected in 1975. Sheathed in gently curving co...

Paramount is the only major studio still located in Hollywood, which makes the 2-hour walking tour around its Hollywood headquarters far more historically enriching than the modern studios in Burbank...

When the Petersen opened in 1994, many locals were surprised that it had taken this long for the city of freeways to salute its most important shaper. Indeed, this museum says more about the city than...

Piers have been a tradition in Southern California since the area's 19th-century seaside resort days. Many have long since disappeared (like Pacific Ocean Park, an entire amusement park perched on off...

A protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright and contemporary of Richard Neutra, Austrian architect Rudolph Schindler designed this innovative modern house for himself in 1921 and 1922. It's now home...

What started as a countrified little amusement park with a couple of relatively tame roller coasters in 1971 has been transformed by Six Flags into a thrill-a-minute daredevil's paradise called The Xt...

This strikingly modern museum/cultural center is quick to remind us that Jewish history is about more than the Holocaust. Nestled in the Sepulveda Pass uphill from the Getty Center, the Skirball explo...

Although it doesn't have quite the historical cachet as Warner Brothers or Paramount, a lot of movie history was made at this Culver City lot. The 2-hour walking tour includes stops at classic stage s...

Unless you were raised in a cave, you've undoubtedly heard of L.A.'s Sunset Boulevard. The most famous of the city's many legendary boulevards, it winds dozens of miles over prime real estate as it tr...

At first glance, you might not think twice about this hot dog-shape bit of kitsch just across from the Beverly Center. But locals adored this closet-size wiener dispensary so much that when it was thr...

These famous 50-foot-high white sheet-metal letters have come to symbolize the movie industry and the city itself. The sign was erected on Mount Lee in 1923 as an advertisement for a real-estate devel...

This National Historic Landmark, built in 1893 and designed by George Wyman, is Los Angeles's oldest commercial building and one of the city's most revered architectural achievements. Legend has it th...

Conceived by grandiose impresario Sid Grauman, The Egyptian Theatre is just down the street from his better-known Chinese Theatre, but it remains less altered from its original design, which was based...

The huge two-story Gamble House, built in 1908 as a California vacation home for the wealthy family of Procter and Gamble fame, is a sublime example of Arts and Crafts architecture. The interior, desi...

The historic Max Factor Building -- Max Factor was the patriarch of the Hollywood make-up industry -- has finally been restored to its original 1935 Art Deco splendor and is now the home of The Hollyw...

Tucked into the hillsides of the San Gabriel Mountains, this sprawling horticultural and botanical center was formerly the estate of silver magnate "Lucky" Baldwin -- the man responsible for bringing ...

This is the city's oldest museum, considered by some a "best-kept secret" that suffers from lack of recognition and space for its superlative collection. Originally opened in 1907 by amateur historian...

Created by the former chairman and CEO of Occidental Petroleum, the Hammer Museum is ensconced in a two-story Carrara marble building attached to the oil company's offices. It's better known for its h...

Union Station, completed in 1939, is one of the finest examples of California mission-style architecture and one of the last of America's great rail stations. It was built with the opulence and attent...

Universal offers daily 1-hour tram tours of its studio lot as part of the general admission price to the amusement park, which is open from 9am to 7pm in the summer and from 10am to 6pm in the winter....

Believing that filmmaking itself is a bona fide attraction, Universal Studios began offering tours to the public in 1964. The concept worked: Today Universal is more than just one of the largest movie...

Designed by renowned architect I. M. Pei, L.A.'s most distinctive skyscraper (it's the round one) is the tallest building between Chicago and Singapore. Built in 1989 at a cost of $450 million, the 76...

The strikingly beautiful Walt Disney Concert Hall isn't just the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; it's a key element in an urban revitalization effort now underway Downtown. The Walt Disney f...

The Warner Brothers tour takes visitors on a 2 1/4-hour informational drive-and-walk jaunt around the studio's faux streets. After a brief introductory film, you'll pile into glorified golf carts and ...

Watts became notorious as the site of riots in the summer of 1965, during which 34 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. Today, a visit to Watts is a lesson in inner-city life. It's a h...

Will Rogers State Historic Park was once Will Rogers's private ranch and grounds. Willed to the state of California in 1944, the 168-acre estate is now both a park and a historic site, supervised by t...