Explore Los Angeles

Los Angeles City Hall, completed in 1928, is the seat of the city's mayor and council in the Civic Center. Its 138-metre tower was the tallest building in the city until 1964. The rotunda has an inlaid marble floor and a tiled dome, and an observation deck near the top of the tower looks out over Downtown and the mountains.

The Bradbury Building at Broadway and Third Street is the oldest commercial building in central Los Angeles, completed in 1893 to a design by George Wyman. Behind a plain brick front, its five-storey atrium has glazed tiles, open cage lifts and ornate cast-iron railings under a glass roof. It is an office building; visitors may step into the lobby.

Angels Flight is a narrow-gauge funicular railway in Downtown Los Angeles that climbs about 90 metres of track between Hill Street and California Plaza on Bunker Hill. First opened in 1901, it was moved half a block and reopened in 1996. Its two orange and black cars, Sinai and Olivet, counterbalance each other on the slope.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, or MOCA, was founded in 1979 and shows art made since 1940. Its main building on Grand Avenue, designed by Arata Isozaki in red sandstone and opened in 1986, holds a collection of some 7,000 works, with abstract expressionism, pop art and art from Los Angeles.

Walt Disney Concert Hall on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 2003, it is clad in curved stainless-steel panels; inside, the 2,265-seat hall has acoustics by Yasuhisa Toyota, and a garden on the upper level is open to visitors.

The Broad is a museum of contemporary art on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, opened in 2015 to show the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. The building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro wraps the galleries in a white honeycomb-like shell, and the collection of some 2,000 works includes art by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons.

The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on Temple Street is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Designed by Rafael Moneo and consecrated in 2002, it replaced the old cathedral damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Its ochre concrete walls avoid right angles, and alabaster panes filter the light into the nave.

Olvera Street is a short brick-paved lane in El Pueblo de Los Ángeles, the oldest part of the city, near where Los Angeles was founded in 1781. Restored as a Mexican-style marketplace in 1930, it is lined with stalls and restaurants and leads to the Avila Adobe of about 1818, the oldest surviving house in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Union Station opened in 1939 as the city's main railway station and is still its busiest transit hub. The building by John and Donald Parkinson combines Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial and Art Deco styles; visitors walk through the waiting room with its leather armchairs and tiled floors and into two shaded courtyard gardens.

Dodger Stadium is the baseball park of the Los Angeles Dodgers in Chavez Ravine, next to Elysian Park, north of Downtown Los Angeles. Opened in 1962, it has about 56,000 seats, the largest capacity of any Major League Baseball park. Visitors come for games, concerts and guided tours of the field, dugouts and press box.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in 1913 in a Beaux-Arts building in Exposition Park. Its collections hold over 35 million specimens and artifacts; visitors see the Dinosaur Hall, the Gem and Mineral Hall, dioramas of African and North American mammals and an exhibition on the history of Los Angeles.

BMO Stadium is a football stadium in Exposition Park, south of Downtown Los Angeles, and the home ground of Los Angeles FC in Major League Soccer and of Angel City FC. It opened in 2018 as Banc of California Stadium, holds about 22,000 spectators and also hosts concerts and other events.

Hollyhock House in Barnsdall Art Park, East Hollywood, was Frank Lloyd Wright's first commission in Los Angeles, built from 1919 to 1921 for the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. Its massive walls and roof terraces carry a stylised hollyhock motif. Part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing since 2019, it is shown as a house museum.

Griffith Observatory stands on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park and opened in 1935. The Art Deco building holds exhibitions on astronomy, the Samuel Oschin Planetarium and a Zeiss refracting telescope open to the public on clear evenings, and its terraces look out over Los Angeles and the Hollywood Sign.

Ripley's Believe It or Not! Hollywood is a museum of curiosities on Hollywood Boulevard, part of the chain based on the collections of the cartoonist and traveller Robert Ripley. Its rooms show oddities, replicas and artworks made from unusual materials, along with displays on record-breaking people and animals.

Griffith Park covers about 1,700 hectares of the eastern Santa Monica Mountains and is one of the largest city parks in the United States. Given to Los Angeles by Griffith J. Griffith in 1896, it has hiking trails up Mount Hollywood, the Griffith Observatory, the Los Angeles Zoo, the Greek Theatre, golf courses and picnic areas.

The La Brea Tar Pits are natural asphalt seeps in Hancock Park on Wilshire Boulevard where fossils of Ice Age animals such as mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and dire wolves have been dug up since the early 1900s. The La Brea Tar Pits Museum shows the skeletons, and visitors can watch excavation and fossil preparation in progress.

The Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood is a restaurant of the Hard Rock chain in the Ovation Hollywood complex on Hollywood Boulevard, beside the Dolby Theatre. Its walls and cases show music memorabilia such as stage costumes, guitars and handwritten lyrics, and it has a bar, a stage for live music and a shop.

The TCL Chinese Theatre is a cinema on Hollywood Boulevard opened by Sid Grauman in 1927, with a façade modelled on a Chinese temple. Its forecourt holds the handprints, footprints and signatures of film stars pressed into concrete since the late 1920s, and the auditorium, converted to IMAX in 2013, still hosts film premieres.

The Dolby Theatre is a 3,400-seat theatre in the Ovation Hollywood complex on Hollywood Boulevard. It opened in 2001 as the Kodak Theatre and has hosted the Academy Awards ceremony since 2002. Between shows and concerts, guided tours take visitors through the auditorium, the lobby and the VIP room.