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• Best Dream Home

  Museum of Jurassic Technology

  It's a favorite of hipsters, artists, scholars, scientists and pretty much anyone with an interest in natural history, dimly lit rooms, mysticism, bees, Wunderkammer, biology, archaeology, pyramids, taxidermy, Victoriana, the notion of what makes a museum a museum, and/or a general sort of elegant weirdness. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which opened in the late 1980s and, along with its… More >>

• Best Moving Pictures

  The Engine Theater

  At first glance, it's a rusted tower crane. Perhaps something dredged up from the ocean, an artifact of some lost city in some displaced future, like Mad Max's Atlantis. Unlike any projection system Los Angeles has ever seen, the Engine Theater is 1,000 pounds of illuminated oxidized-steel sculpture that rotates to hold a 17-by-10-foot film screen. Built by Silver Lake–based filmmaker… More >>

• Best Steam Trains

  Walt Disney's Carolwood Barn

  Steam trains were an obsession for Walt Disney since his childhood. From his earliest sketches, he planned to have a railroad circling around the park at Disneyland. Ward Kimball and Ollie Johnson, two of Disney Studios' "Nine Old Men" of animation, shared the same obsession. They introduced Walt to their hobby of narrow-gauge live-steam backyard railroading, inspiring Disney to re-create… More >>

• Best Ticket to Train Heaven

  Travel Town Museum

  In the general category of obsessive types, rail fanatics are hard to beat. It's one of those fixations that begins in childhood and can balloon into an all-consuming, nostalgia-drenched existence. A glance at any historical rail Web site, typically filled with pages of precise timetables, minutiae about obsolete technology and other arcane information relating to gauge size and engine types… More >>

• Best Ape Hoots and Howls

  Gibbon Conservation Center

  The sun is high, the sky is blue, and a few scattered hoots are on the verge of becoming a rare midafternoon chorus at the Gibbon Conservation Center. "These guys usually sing in the morning," says Alan Mootnick, director of the center. "But maybe you'll get lucky." Sure enough, the hoots quickly multiply into a deafening harmony of gibbon clatter. "Well,… More >>

• Best Hollywood Trash Collectors

  World of Wonder Storefront Gallery

  Estelle Getty would be rolling in her grave if she knew that there's a pornographic painting of her vagina out there. The World of Wonder Storefront Gallery opened its doors last summer with the now infamous "Golden Gals Gone Wild," an exhibit inspired by The Golden Girls that includes erotic depictions of Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia, and a lone… More >>

• Best Doggy Hike

  Runyon Canyon

  The only off-leash hiking area in the city, Runyon Canyon is the best place to let your dog run free and enjoy sprawling views of the Hollywood Hills. With 90 acres to roam, both you and Prince will get a good workout walk or run. Of course, this see-and-be-seen slice of nature is also known as a great celebrity-spotting sight… More >>

• Best Blooming Urban Renewal

  Exposition Park Rose Garden

  It's hard to believe in a city that's largely known for creating the decentralized urban form, but even during Los Angeles' early years, shared public places were a given. Often, they didn't take shape without a fight, and one of the most pleasant places in L.A., now known as the Exposition Park Rose Garden, is a result of such turf… More >>

• Best Place to Tie the Knot

  Marvimon

  We've all been there: hot Scottish boyfriend needs a green card and you've always wanted a European passport; or, your waif-y girlfriend has systemic candida and could suck some serious marrow out of your SAG health insurance. All signs point to happily ever after, so you throw both caution and commitment-phobia to the wind and decide to tie the knot. You've… More >>

• Best Measure of a Man

  Porn Prints at Studs Theatre

  How to measure penis size discreetly: big nose, big hose? Large feet ... ? Measuring the tip of the middle finger to the base of the palm? Outside Studs Theatre in West Hollywood, you can gaze upon the scrawl of the late and lamented Linda Lovelace, marvel at the impressive confidence oozing from the signatures of Harry Reems and Marilyn… More >>

• L.A. From the Top and Bottom: Best View from Money

  La Cañada Flintridge Country Club

  What first hits your nose is the perspiration scent of canyon sage that rims the country club's parking lot, 1,600 feet above sea level. The big homes directly below, with their aqua-blue swimming pools and juniper windbreaks, probably look a lot like yours if you belong to this club. The horizon beyond is troubled with blights that are easily imagined… More >>

• L.A. From the Top and Bottom: Best View from Justice

  District Attorney's Office

  It's a wonder Steve Cooley gets anything done. The District Attorney's 18th-floor office enjoys a sweeping, hi-def southern exposure — it's impossible to tear yourself away from its view of downtown Los Angeles and beyond, to the peninsula. If it's true the most spectacular views are from the ugliest buildings, then the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center only confirms… More >>

• L.A. From the Top and Bottom: Best Gazing from the Golden Hood

  Baldwin Hills

  From one of the $1 million decks on South Cloverdale Avenue, Los Angeles looks vaguely familiar yet radically different. Inside out, almost — a parallel, alternate Los Angeles. There's a tart metaphor here for Baldwin Hills, the affluent African-American neighborhood long ago dubbed the Golden Ghetto. Baldwin Hills (named for Lucky, not James) sees the city from the opposite direction… More >>

• L.A. From the Top and Bottom: Best View from Heaven

  Griffith Park Observatory

  The observatory is sometimes so dismissively associated with tourists and high school field trips (including the famous one from Rebel Without a Cause) that it takes a visit by distant relatives to make you realize how ethereal this place really is. Elevation is everything in L.A., and the home of the big telescope is more than 500 feet higher than… More >>

• L.A. From the Top and Bottom: Up from the Bottom

  MacArthur Park Metro Station

  You might feel like you're trapped in a fancy Chinese restaurant as you walk out of the MacArthur Park Red Line station, what with its great walls of shiny scarlet tiles. Suddenly, as you're about to ascend from this subterranean cave to Alvarado Street, the perspective dreamily changes. Looking up, beyond the escalator glimmer of rail and steps, the eye… More >>

• Best Make-Believe Mayberry

  Franklin Canyon Park

  Just off Coldwater Canyon at Mulholland is a secluded nature retreat millions of mental miles away from the clamor of rush-hour traffic. You may recognize the duck pond, woodland setting and three-acre lake from their starring role as the background on The Andy Griffith Show reruns. With its amphitheater and nature museum, Franklin Canyon Park is a nice day's ideal… More >>

• Best Theater-in-the-Round

  Velaslavasay Panorama

  It's a little neighborhood movie theater in Union Square, which you'd almost miss if you weren't facing it as you drive up Union Street on the way to USC. Mint green and unassuming, the former Union Theatre — once known as Fairyland — had served as headquarters for the Tile Layers Union (Local 18) for 30 years, a movie theater,… More >>

• Best Foot Forward (Or Back)

  Sign at Sunset Foot Clinic

  Eels said it best with their song "Sad Foot Sign": "Sad foot sign, why you gotta/taunt me this way/the happy side is broken now/it's gonna be an awful day." Anyone traveling down Sunset Boulevard to or from Echo Park has seen it: the big rotating sign for the Sunset Foot Clinic, one side of which depicts a happy and healthy… More >>

• Best Telescope

  Mount Wilson Observatory

  The Griffith Observatory may get all the press, but high up in the San Gabriel Mountains is another space-gazing outpost equally worth a visit. The Mount Wilson Observatory, on a summit 5,712 feet above Pasadena, is a haven for astronomers both amateur and professional. Founded in 1904 by George Ellery Hale, who was looking for a place to continue his… More >>

• Best Glass Houses

  Judson Studios

  Searing flames. Tiny pieces of brilliantly colored glass. Hot molten lead cames. These are the same tools of the trade the Judson Studios have used in Los Angeles since 1897 to make stained-glass windows. Judson Studios specializes in an old-fashioned craft that hasn't changed much since the Middle Ages within a city known for its obsession with the new. And it's… More >>

• Best Art Star Scouting

  Hope Gallery - CLOSED

  A collaboration between Fairfax's Family bookstore and Teenage Teardrops' Cali Dewitt, the Hope Gallery sits on Echo Park Avenue's well-trafficked bohemian block of shops by the historic Chicken Corner. Focusing on local and upcoming artists with a penchant for comic style illustration and psychedelic installations, the Hope Gallery has already established itself as a premiere locale for Echo Park's booming… More >>

• Best Models

  Roundhouse Train Store

  The oldest and longest-running train store in Los Angeles is nestled on a block of Victory Boulevard, next to tiki bar (and fellow sixties relic) the Tonga Hut. Stepping inside the Roundhouse, one enters a Los Angeles of the past. The coffee pot's always on, and free cups are offered up with an alternative choice of orange or grape Shasta… More >>

• Best Beach

  Point Dume

  Often mistaken for the phonetic spelling (doom), which perhaps accounts for the fortunately sparse population of beachgoers, the beach at Point Dume is a reliably pristine shore, one of the few beaches in Southern California where human footprints dissolve, parking is free and pods of porpoises trace the perimeters like graceful bodyguards. Dume is a surfer's sanctuary, a secluded escape… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Wooden

  Ghost Rider

  There is heated debate among roller-coaster riders over which is better: wooden tracks or steel tracks. Steel people cite smoothness and power. Wood people cite superiority of noise, the "classic" clattering sound wheels make on wood struts. Back in the '80s, Magic Mountain's wooden behemoth Colossus was the giant to conquer. It was the tallest, the fastest and the only… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Appetizer of Terror

  Boomerang

  As you stand in line, the cars rush past you like a horde of screaming banshees. It is a terrible sound. It's so terrible, it's almost funny. You pull out of the station backward, up a hill, through the station again, through a roll, an inverted loop, then a hill, then falling, falling, falling, backward. A swift kick in the… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Scariest

  Xcelerator

  In two seconds, this monster accelerates straight out of the gate to 82 mph via the workings of a powerful hydraulic catapult motor — and pure evil. "Like a monkey being sent into outer space," was how one guy described the sensation. Other rides are perhaps longer, slicker and more powerful, but sheer speed and angle of ascent and descent… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

  Ninja

  Otherwise known as the ride that Ewoks would have built — if they weren't fighting off stormtroopers with rocks and saving the Empire. You board a little black dangling pouch of a car and, suspended from the track above, thread your way through trees, swinging side to side, bobbing and weaving through the foliage, dodging branches and swooping over ponds.… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Recalling the Old Days

  Montezooma's Revenge

  Remember when just the name Montezooma's Revenge was enough to raise your hackles? You were 8, maybe, and had to look up what it meant. And when you learned that it was a cool name for traveler's diarrhea, and were struck by the perfectness of naming a scary ride after an unpleasant bodily function, you knew that even though you… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Approximation of Stomach Poisoning

  Sierra Sidewinder

  Imagine it as the roller-coaster version of Disneyland's whirling tea-cups ride. Germans designed this ride. It is their vision of what a desert sidewinder snake would do, influenced by a touch of waltzing. Targeted for older kids (and wussy adults), each of the spinning four-seater cars rotates uncontrollably, like a quartet of dizzy ladybugs, so you can't try to game… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Mild-Mannered Water Coaster

  Log Ride vs. Splash Mountain (Tie)

  There is a certain class of rides that is not quite waterslide, not quite roller coaster proper. Water-coasters are distinct from rides like Big Foot Rapids at Knott's, where you and your party clamber aboard a large circular rubber innertube with seats, are carried along a rolling bagel-toaster-like conveyor belt and bounced along swirling "rapids." Splash Mountain is like a musical… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Moody Atmospherics

  Big Thunder Mountain Railroad

  For mood and atmosphere, night is the ideal time to ride certain coasters. Most roller coasters attempt to put your body through the ringer — screw the theatrics. If you expect animatronic werewolves to pop out at you on Silver Bullet at Magic Mountain, you'll be disappointed. While queuing up for one roller coaster at Magic Mountain and noting the… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Unintentionally Scary

  Matterhorn

  The abominable snowman with the glowing red eyes who growls as your bobsled shoots by? Not scary. The rumbling mountain itself, which threatens to rain avalanches of snow down on you? Not scary. The sensation that your ridiculous carnival-style seat belt might come unbuckled as you hurtle down the track? Pretty damn scary. In 1984, 48-year-old Dolly Regene Young was… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Simulation of Quidditch, or Broomstick Riding

  Tatsu

  Silver Bullet at Knott's is like Harry Potter taking a pleasant little joyride on his broomstick. Tatsu at Magic Mountain is like Harry flying on his broomstick, chasing after the golden snitch with Voldemort on his tail about to devour his soul. For those of you unfamiliar with the Potter oeuvre, translated, that means: Tatsu is worse. So much worse.… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: Substitute for Actually Dying, then Coming Back to Life

  X2

  Each seat on Magic Mountain's X2 is equipped with speakers (à la Space Mountain), and as the ride pulls out of the station, Frank Sinatra croons in your ear, "It had to be you." Then, Metallica's "Enter Sandman" comes on, overlapped with yelling from the ruthless drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. "Just remember your training, and you'll survive," joked… More >>

• Best L.A. Roller Coaster: All-Around

  Space Mountain

  Besmirched by just enough lore of real-life death, mainly due to stupid people ignoring posted safety warnings, or having surprise seizures and exploding brain aneurysms, Disney's squeaky-clean Space Mountain has it all. The frisson of possible, though improbable, bodily danger. A sleek, genuinely thrilling ride, fast and twisty enough to wake the butterflies in your stomach but not so frightening… More >>

• Best Tombs With a View

  Cinespia at Hollywood Forever Cemetery

  The Cinespia film screenings at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, otherwise known as "I see movies with dead people," started in 2002 with a handful of hardcore film buffs and has evolved into a several-thousand-people weekly summer pilgrimage. On Saturday and Sunday evenings through mid-September, people traipse across the cemetery lawn toting picnic baskets, pillows and low folding chairs. Classic midcentury… More >>

• Best Public Art

  Pacific Nexus Gallery

  In a town teeming with super-rad public art spray-painted across buildings, stickered onto scaffolding, dangling from power lines and hacked into digital billboards (yay, Skullphone!), who can say where and what "the best" is? I can. There's a building in Venice on the southwest corner of Brooks and Pacific that houses an art gallery of sorts, and is home to all kinds… More >>

• Best Place to Stop and Enjoy the Traffic

  The 10/110 Interchange

  Los Angeles is known around the world for its miles of winding concrete freeways, which too often go unappreciated. While the days of chatting on the phone during commutes are over, there's no shortage of fun to be had while sitting bumper-to-bumper. When else would you have time to listen to NPR, try out the mix CD your ex-girlfriend made… More >>

• Best Underground Sounds

  Los Angeles Theatre

  Two stories below Broadway, beneath the ceaseless hustle and/or bustle, there's a ballroom in the belly of the Los Angeles Theatre. When it's an empty belly, everything echoes, as though calling forth the sounds of past dancers up from the bedrock and delivering them once more. It's the kind of rippling acoustic reverie that sounds like laughter, or ball bearings,… More >>

• Best Picnic Spot for Cowboys

  Paramount Ranch

  The Paramount Ranch has stood in for Tombstone, Laredo, Dodge City and a host of other cowboy movie landmarks. The façade of a Western town still stands at the entrance and is occasionally used for TV and film shoots. A large grassy area with tables is perfect for picnics. Various trailheads lead into easy hikes through Malibu Creek State Park.—Molly… More >>