Cinema finally got a museum to match its home town when the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened on Wilshire Boulevard in September 2021. Operated by the organisation behind the Oscars, it is the largest institution in the United States devoted to the art, craft and history of moviemaking, drawing on a collection numbering in the tens of millions of objects, from props and costumes to posters, scripts and equipment. The building itself is part of the attraction. Architect Renzo Piano joined.....

America's first great Black LGBTQ+ discotheque still fills its dance floors on Pico Boulevard. Catch One - for 42 years Jewel's Catch One - occupies a 1925 Mediterranean Revival building at 4067 West Pico Boulevard in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. Jewel Thais-Williams, a UCLA history graduate turned entrepreneur, opened the club in 1973 after being turned away from West Hollywood clubs for being Black and a woman; a state law then barred women from tending bar unless they owned the venue, so s.....

Los Angeles watches movies with its buried movie stars, and it started with eighty people and a Hitchcock print. Cinespia at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, held its first screening on 20 July 2002, when 27-year-old film-club founder John Wyatt projected Strangers on a Train against the west wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum - the building holding Rudolph Valentino's crypt - for members of his Italian film club and word-of-mouth guests. Wyatt had spotted the potential of t.....

The neon crown above Wilshire Boulevard has been glowing since 1936. The El Rey Theatre at 5515 Wilshire, in the heart of the Miracle Mile's preserved Art Deco district, was designed by Clifford A. Balch - architect of more than twenty Southern California picture houses - as a single-screen neighbourhood cinema, its Zigzag Moderne facade, terrazzo forecourt and blazing vertical sign making it one of the finest surviving examples of the style in the city. It ran movies for nearly fifty years, th.....

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 .....

Thousands of Angelenos picnic on a cemetery lawn every summer Saturday, watching movies projected onto a mausoleum wall while Douglas Fairbanks rests a few metres away. The Fairbanks Lawn at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, is the grand greensward fronting the reflecting-pool monument of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr., and it has become one of Los Angeles's most beloved and unlikely outdoor venues. Hollywood Forever, founded in 1899, is the resting place of an astonishing.....

In the middle of Los Angeles, on the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard known as the Miracle Mile, bubbles one of the world's richest fossil sites: the La Brea Tar Pits, where natural asphalt has seeped to the surface for tens of thousands of years. The sticky pools, set in the green expanse of Hancock Park, have trapped and preserved Ice Age animals in extraordinary numbers, making this a working palaeontological dig in the heart of a modern city. The science here is remarkable. Over millennia, cru.....

The largest natural and historical museum in the western United States, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sits in Exposition Park, just south of downtown. Opened in 1913, it was the first dedicated museum in the city, and its original Beaux-Arts building, crowned by a domed rotunda, remains at the heart of a complex that has grown over more than a century. The collections span the natural world and human history alike, holding tens of millions of specimens and artefacts. Its dino.....

King Kong was captive on this stage in 1933; ten Academy Awards ceremonies followed him. The Shrine Auditorium at 665 West Jefferson Boulevard opened on 23 January 1926, a Moorish Revival colossus by John C. Austin with interiors by theatre master G. Albert Lansburgh, replacing the 1906 Al Malaikah Temple that fire had gutted in thirty minutes in 1920. The scale was the point: 6,700 seats originally - still around 6,300 after the 2002 renovation - under a dome-topped shell resembling a vast mos.....

The ballroom next to the famous auditorium once held 6,000 dancers on a sprung floor. The Shrine Expo Hall at 649 West Jefferson Boulevard is the exhibition half of the 1926 Shrine complex - 54,000 square feet of column-free space running 150 by 250 feet, with a main floor, open mezzanine and basement built alongside the auditorium when the Shriners rebuilt after their 1920 fire. The hall's modern identity is as one of Los Angeles's hardest-working standing-room venues: a 5,000-capacity general.....