Explore Pasadena

The Norton Simon Museum on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena shows the collection assembled by the industrialist Norton Simon, who took over the former Pasadena Art Museum in 1974. It holds European art from the Renaissance to the 20th century, with works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Degas and Van Gogh, and sculpture from South and Southeast Asia.

The Gamble House in Pasadena was built in 1908 by the architects Charles and Henry Greene as a winter home for David and Mary Gamble of Procter & Gamble. It is a key work of the American Arts and Crafts movement, with deep eaves, sleeping porches and hand-crafted teak and mahogany interiors, and is shown on guided tours.

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.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, next to Pasadena, was founded in 1919 by the railway magnate Henry E. Huntington. Its library holds rare books and manuscripts such as a Gutenberg Bible; the art collections include Gainsborough's The Blue Boy, and some 49 hectares of themed gardens surround the buildings.

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 Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens lies in the north-east corner of Griffith Park and opened in 1966. It keeps around 1,400 animals of some 270 species in habitats grouped by region, among them the Elephants of Asia area and a gorilla reserve, and it took part in the breeding programme that saved the California condor.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.