A garment factory in the warehouse district now runs some of LA's heaviest bills. 1720, at 1720 East 16th Street just west of Santa Fe Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, opened in late 2017 when a trio of local rock musicians converted the old factory into a multi-purpose, all-ages venue. Designer Brant Ritter kept the raw industrial shell - high ceilings, exposed pipes, steel beams, painted concrete, a Nick Knudson triptych mural on the wall - and dropped best-in-class sound and lighting into it. .....

Los Angeles keeps its Broadway on Grand Avenue. The Ahmanson Theatre at 135 North Grand Avenue is one of the four venues of the Music Center, the downtown performing-arts acropolis, and the city's principal house for large-scale theatre: pre-Broadway tryouts, the best of Broadway and West End tours, and Center Theatre Group's flagship productions have filled its stage since the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera opened it on 12 April 1967 with Man of La Mancha. Underwritten by financier Howard F. Ah.....

An oil baron's playhouse became downtown LA's velvet-draped concert hall. The Belasco - the name is often misrendered, including as Balesco - stands at 1050 South Hill Street, commissioned in 1926 by petroleum magnate Edward Doheny alongside the neighbouring Mayan Theatre as a bid to pull Los Angeles's theatre district south. Morgan, Walls and Clements designed it in exuberant Churrigueresque Spanish style, and it opened on 1 November 1926 with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, named for Broadway impres.....

Built in the corner of Exposition Park, a short walk from the Coliseum and the city's cluster of museums, BMO Stadium opened in April 2018 as the first new open-air stadium in Los Angeles since Dodger Stadium in 1962. Designed by Gensler as a soccer-specific ground, it holds about 22,000 spectators, with capacity rising toward 24,000 for concerts, and it serves as home to two professional clubs: Major League Soccer's Los Angeles FC and Angel City FC of the National Women's Soccer League. The de.....

The longest-running puppet theater in America lives in a 1920s movie house in Highland Park. Bob Baker and Alton Wood founded the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in 1963 in a converted scenic shop at 1345 West 1st Street on the edge of downtown Los Angeles, and for 55 years the cinder-block building hosted the same magic: red-clad puppeteers working hand-crafted marionettes inches from children seated in a circle on the floor, through original shows running from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker to musical .....

A defining feature of downtown Los Angeles, Crypto.com Arena is one of the busiest and most famous indoor arenas in the world. Opened in 1999 and known for most of its life as the Staples Center, the venue was renamed in 2021 but remains an unmistakable landmark of the city, anchoring the L.A. Live entertainment district and serving as the beating heart of professional sport in the region. The arena is remarkable for the sheer number of major teams it hosts, including the Lakers and Clippers in.....

One determined newspaper publisher's wife raised over eighteen million dollars - Time magazine called it the most impressive display of virtuoso money-raising in the history of American womanhood - and Los Angeles finally got its great concert hall. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at 135 North Grand Avenue, the founding building of the Music Center on Bunker Hill, was dedicated on 27 September 1964 and opened with a gala Los Angeles Philharmonic concert under Zubin Mehta that December. Designed by.....

Two Olympic Games have already played out on this ground, and a third arrives in 2028. Exposition Park, the 160-acre state-owned campus at 700 Exposition Park Drive in South Los Angeles, began life in 1872 as an agricultural fairground and was reborn between 1910 and 1913 as a City Beautiful ensemble of museum, armory and sunken rose garden - the cultural heart that grew into LA's densest concentration of museums and stadiums. The park's centrepiece is the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, opened .....

USC waited more than a century for this building. The Galen Center, at 3400 South Figueroa Street on the southeast corner of Figueroa and Jefferson across from the university campus, opened on 12 October 2006 - finally giving the Trojans an on-campus arena after decades of basketball played at the Shrine Auditorium, the Olympic Auditorium and, from 1959, the LA Memorial Sports Arena. The push that made it real began in 2002, when banker Louis Galen and his wife Helene started a series of gifts .....

It opened with rows of seats specially widened for patrons over 200 pounds, and its impresario filled the orchestra pit with foliage because he found intermission music intrusive. The Globe Theatre, at 740 South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles's Broadway Theater District, opened on 6 January 1913 as the Morosco Theatre - a Beaux-Arts playhouse built for producer Oliver Morosco inside the eleven-storey Garland Building. Designed by Morgan, Walls and Morgan with interiors by Alfred F. Rosenheim,.....