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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Colorado Street Bridge carries Colorado Boulevard about 45 metres above the Arroyo Seco on the western edge of Pasadena. Opened in 1913, the concrete bridge follows a curve across the ravine on a series of tall arches with Beaux-Arts lamp posts and railings, and it was restored after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.