Tourist attractions Los Angeles

This sprawling six-building complex, generally referred to by the acronym LACMA, is the nation's largest art museum west of Chicago. Housing a broad collection ranging from Egyptian and pre-Columbian art to contemporary works, LACMA is also the city'..

Elegantly displayed in a spare contemporary building are 1,000 works from a private art collection spanning seven centuries of European painting and sculpture and 2,00 years of Asian sculpture. Entrepreneur Norton Simon began collecting paintings in ..

Part fully functioning film and television studio, part live-entertainment complex and amusement park, 420-acre Universal Studios Hollywood sprawls across and down a hillside overlooking the San Fernando Valley, 3mi northwest of Hollywood Boulevard. ..

The Huntington comprises one of the world’s finest research libraries of rare books and manuscripts; a world-class collection of 18-19C British art, French and American works; and renowned botanical gardens. Secluded in the upscale Pasadena suburb of..

Standing apart from the glittering skyscrapers just to the southwest, City Hall's 28-story, pyramid-topped tower remains one of downtown Los Angeles' most distinctive landmarks. It reopened in 2002 after a four-year, $300-million restoration project ..

Completed in 1893, the five-story building's modest brick exterior conceals a splendid atrium inspired by a description of an AD 2000 commercial building in Edward Bellamy's futuristic novel Looking Backward. Bathed in diffuse natural light from a sk..

Los Angeles' hilltop mecca for the performing arts is an elegant group of three white marble structures and the imposing 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall, occupying a 10-acre elevated plaza. Home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Master C..

An intriguing assemblage of geometric forms clad in red Indian sandstone and green aluminum panels, this museum (1986), commonly referred to as MOCA, showcases visual art produced since the 1940s.Cubes, a cylinder and 11 pyramidal skylights define MO..

A grand hotel is the prerequisite of a great metropolis, and this 1,000-room masterpiece, built in 1923 and fashioned after a 16C Italianate palace, raised the world's opinion of Los Angeles by embracing people's imagination, much as the new Walt Dis..

Faced in turquoise and gold glazed terra cotta, the 13-story Art Deco landmark (1930) presents a bevy of geometric shapes, zigzags, chevrons and stylized animal and plant forms. Atop the building, you'll see a four-sided, two-story clock tower, the w..

Although on first sight this museum, which is dedicated to music in the United States, conjures up images of an overly ostentatious version of the Grammy Awards, this impression is soon dispelled. Including explanations on different styles of music, ..

Recognizing the growing city's need for suburban shopping accessible by automobile, department-store owner John G. Bullock and his partner, P.G. Winnett, decided to build a branch of the downtown retail store on a barren stretch of Wilshire west of L..

Built at a cost of $1 million on the site of Agricultural Park's motor speedway, the oval coliseum (1923, Parkinson & Parkinson) is Los Angeles' preeminent sports stadium, hosting college football games as well as international soccer competitions, r..

This broad, varied collection of more than 35 million specimens and artifacts from the fields of life sciences, earth sciences and history ranks third in size in the US, after the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the National M..

Towering castle-like above the freeway from a slope of Mt. Washington, the Mission Revival building (1914) houses Los Angeles' oldest museum, dedicated to comprehensive collections and research facilities on Native American cultures. The formation of..

Hugging the top of the hill, the tile, wood and stucco house (1921) was the first Frank Lloyd Wright building in Los Angeles. Interior and exterior ornamentation was inspired by hollyhocks, art patron Aline Barnsdall's favorite flower. It underwent a..

From a promontory on the south slope of 1,625ft Mt. Hollywood, Griffith Park's highest peak, this Art Deco observatory (1935) was donated by Col. Griffith at a cost of $255,780. With its central 84ft copper planetarium dome and two smaller flanking d..

One of the largest urban parks in the US, rugged Griffith Park straddles some 4,103 acres of the Santa Monica Mountains, 5mi northwest of downtown Los Angeles and immediately northeast of Hollywood.The majority of the land was donated by Griffith J. ..

Built in the wake of worldwide excitement over the discovery of King Tut's tomb, this faux-Egyptian movie palace (1922, Meyer and Holler) opened to tremendous fanfare when Sid Grauman chose it to stage the world's first Hollywood premiere. Fully rest..

Visitors to this museum on the site of the famous Rancho La Brea Tar Pits can learn about Los Angeles as it was between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, when animals such as saber-toothed cats and mammoths roamed the region. Fund..