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. .....

When Factory 93 wants a sunset, it books Naud Street. 1756 Naud Street, an industrial lot on the edge of Chinatown beside the Los Angeles State Historic Park, is downtown LA's favourite open-air techno yard: the outdoor venue where Insomniac's underground brand Factory 93 has staged Carl Cox, Green Velvet, Nicole Moudaber, Amelie Lens, Charlotte de Witte and Honey Dijon, and where the Secret Project festival planted its first editions. The formula is simple and beloved: a warehouse-district bla.....

Two decades of Hollywood dance-floor history live at one address. Academy LA, at 6021 Hollywood Boulevard near Gower, is the latest and grandest identity of a building that has served Los Angeles dance music as Qtopia, Vanguard and Create - until Insomniac, the promoter behind Electric Daisy Carnival, partnered with Exchange LA to gut and rebuild it, relaunching in January 2018 with the production values of a festival main stage compressed into a club. The numbers explain the reputation: a Funk.....

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.....

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.....

Set in a natural bowl in the Chavez Ravine hills just north of downtown Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium has been the home of the Los Angeles Dodgers since it opened in 1962, and it is now the third-oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball, after Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. With a listed capacity of 56,000, it is also the largest baseball stadium in the world by seating, a figure the club has famously kept unchanged through decades of renovation. The stadium's arrival was not without controversy......

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.....

The Rolling Stones squeezed onto a basement stage in Echo Park in 2013, warming up for their Hyde Park shows in front of a few hundred stunned Angelenos - the kind of night the Echoplex has made a habit of. The room at 1154 Glendale Boulevard opened in 2006 directly beneath The Echo, its 350-capacity older sibling that had been running on Sunset Boulevard since 2001, and the two stacked venues quickly became the twin engine of the Los Angeles independent music scene. Both rooms were built by Sp.....