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.....

Few place names signal wealth as immediately as Beverly Hills, the small city ringed by Los Angeles that built its identity on Hollywood money and luxury retail. The land was home to the Tongva people, who called the spring-fed site the gathering of the waters, and it later became a Mexican rancho and then lima-bean fields before a syndicate drilling for oil struck water instead and laid out a town. Beverly Hills was incorporated in 1914, two years after the Beverly Hills Hotel opened and began .....

A hallowed institution of American stand-up, The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood is one of the most famous comedy clubs in the world. Founded in 1972 in a building that once housed the legendary Ciro's nightclub, the club became the crucible of modern stand-up comedy, a place where countless legendary careers were forged and where the raw, boundary-pushing style of contemporary comedy took shape over the following decades. The venue is spread across multiple rooms, each with .....

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.....

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.....

Synonymous with wealth and luxury, Rodeo Drive is a short stretch of street in Beverly Hills lined with some of the most exclusive shops in the world. Its three central blocks, just off the boulevards of the city, hold the flagship boutiques of the great fashion houses and jewellers, and the name has become global shorthand for high-end shopping and the glamour of Southern California. The street rose to fame in the second half of the twentieth century as designers and luxury brands clustered al.....

George Gershwin played a sheep pasture's concert hall in 1936; the pasture became UCLA. Royce Hall at 340 Royce Drive is the defining building of the university's Westwood campus - one of the original four structures of 1929, its twin-towered Lombard Romanesque facade modelled on Milan's Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio by architects Allison and Allison. The building opened as the campus's main classroom block with an auditorium designed for speech rather than music, yet by the late 1930s Duke Ellingt.....

The Los Angeles edition of the Sloomoo Institute opened in 2024 on Fairfax Avenue, bringing the slime-themed sensory attraction to the West Coast in a large, vividly coloured space. Following the model of the brand's earlier venues in New York and other cities, it builds an entire experience around the tactile pleasures of slime, blending play, design and a dash of wellness. The institute traces its origins to two friends who found unexpected calm and delight in handling slime and set out to sh.....

Built to feel like an idealised town centre rather than a shopping mall, The Grove is an open-air retail and entertainment complex that has become one of the most popular gathering places in Los Angeles. Opened in 2002 beside the historic Original Farmers Market, it combines shops, restaurants and a cinema along landscaped streets, complete with a dancing fountain and a vintage-style trolley. The development was designed to evoke a nostalgic, pedestrian-friendly streetscape, with façades in a .....

Neil Young opened the room in September 1973 and came back fifty years later to the day - between those two bookings runs most of rock history. The Roxy Theatre at 9009 West Sunset Boulevard on the Sunset Strip opened on September 20, 1973, founded by Lou Adler and Elmer Valentine with partners including David Geffen, Elliot Roberts and Peter Asher, in a building that had housed the Largo strip club. The founders' brief was artist-first: a state-of-the-art club where musicians of every genre fe.....