People & Places

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• Best Spot for Graffiti Spotting

  Bridge at confluence of Arroyo Seco and L.A. River

  L.A. is a city with a skeleton of concrete. For graffiti artists, this corpse can be a canvas. In some urban corners, often left untouched (and unbuffed) by the powers that be, graffiti murals spring up like trees planted by invisible arborists. But these areas, like old-growth forests, are becoming rare. The mouth of the Belmont Tunnel — where the… More >>

• Best F-U NEW YORK Museum

  Hammer Museum

  Billionaires covet eponymous museums like starlets pursue bigger breasts, then stock them with established names like rappers flashing their bling. Yet time often transcends such vanities, and a good museum becomes a presenter of breakthrough or unsung work. So beckons the Hammer Museum. Start with architecture that interacts with the street, making its shows Wilshire Boulevard–visible. Add programming that thinks… More >>

• Best Japanese Garden

  Suiho En

  Suiho En, or the Garden of Water and Fragrance, is a stunning, traditional Japanese garden at the center of the San Fernando Valley’s vast watershed that reminds us of the beauty of water and nature, in poetic contrast to the adjacent reclamation plant that removes tons of sludge from our water system daily. Visitors are urged to walk, sit, “emulate… More >>

• Best Inhospitable Hospital (1904)

  Linda Vista Community Hospital

  Abandoned places have their own energy — or seem to, at least, if you watch any basic-cable pseudoscience-channel filler programs about hauntings or the paranormal. The abandoned Linda Vista Community Hospital in Boyle Heights is used these days as a shooting location for everything from episodes of ER to music videos to assorted horror movies dripping with that dull post-Saw… More >>

• Best Host to Toast a Ghost

  G.H.O.U.L.A.

  It doesn’t take much more than decent eyesight to see a celebrity in L.A. But a ghost? That might take some doing. Fortunately, Richard Carradine and G.H.O.U.L.A. are here to help. Ghost Hunters of Urban Los Angeles hosts “Spirits With Spirits” gatherings, on the 13th of each month, in a haunted locale. Their slogan: “Let’s put the ‘Boo!’ back into… More >>

• Best Other Malibu

  Charmlee Wilderness Park

  When you think of Malibu, you think of the coastal area made famous by mellow, surfable beaches, spacious seafood-and-cocktail emporiums and the estate of Barbra Streisand. But there’s a whole other Malibu up in the hills that’s wild, dramatic and full of untrodden nature. If you go way up the Pacific Coast Highway, far into Malibu, and then turn north… More >>

• Around the World in 80,000 Plants (1956)

  Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden

  Joyce Kilmer wrote: “I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree.” What about an entire huge place full of trees, huh Joyce? Amazing, inspiring trees from around the freakin’ world. Old Joyce would have flipped her proverbial wig if she’d ever visited the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden in Arcadia. Opened in 1956, the… More >>

• Best Place to Daydream (1920)

  Warner Bros. Theatre

  The Warner Bros. Theatre, in the downtown jewelry district, is easy to pass by without a second glance. Only the faint outline of the familiar Warner Bros. emblem, a soft-edged diamond breastplate, is visible outside, giving only a tiny clue to what lies hidden inside. Despite the Great Depression, when the masses couldn’t find food to eat or work to… More >>

• Wood nymph — there’s a fairy in my tea!

  The Bourgeois Pig

  The Bourgeois Pig is a late-night café with a hippie-Moroccan twist. Set on the Franklin Avenue strip in Hollywood, this bohemian café offers the usual coffees, chai lattes, herbal teas, croissants, muffins, sandwiches and smokes. But we’re not reviewing the food; it’s the ambience that’s the real draw here. Blue walls, large mirrors with gold frames, a gold cupid and… More >>

• Best Hidden Fountain Rendezvous

  Watercourt

  Those who don’t know downtown are missing an oasis amid the skyscrapers atop Bunker Hill: the California Plaza’s sunken Watercourt, set in a small amphitheater where the big building owners annually sponsor the summerlong free arts events known as Grand Performances. During fall, winter and spring, it becomes a place of quiet, drawing migrating birds and people reading books or… More >>

• Best Ship of Ghouls (1936)

  Queen Mary

  You think of Long Beach as the home of Snoop Dogg, Warren G and the band Sublime, but it’s also the adopted home of the Queen Mary. Nothing’s more gangsta than a luxury ocean liner featuring nightlife opportunities, Art Deco opulence, a history of undercover service in WWII (under the maritime nom de guerre Grey Ghost) and inclusion as a… More >>

• Best Twisty Motorcycle Ride

  Mulholland Highway

  You’re whipping among rolling hills on Mulholland Highway between Malibu Canyon and Kanan Dume Road, past big vistas and California Live Oaks on a twisty yet smooth stretch of asphalt. It’s perfect, with dappled sunlight and the coastal feel of the Corniche de l’Esterel road near Cannes — plus it’s got cactus and healthy Californians on bicycles. Start early, because… More >>

• Best Place to Look Around (1920s)

  Union Theatre

  The Union Theatre in West Adams was originally a silent-movie house dating back to before the 1920s. Erstwhile screen siren Louise Glaum temporarily turned the theater into an acting school and playhouse in the 1930s, but by 1939, it had returned to showing films. After the war, it was the headquarters for the Tile Layers Local 18, and in the… More >>

• Best Turn-of-the-Century Trip

  Angels Flight

  Angels Flight was the title of a low-budget 1965 film noir and a 1999 book by Michael Connelly, but the eponymous funicular has a story of its own. Col. J.W. Eddy, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, built the Los Angeles Incline Railway in 1901, which originally connected Hill and Olive streets. Its two cars, Sinai and Olivet, served early Angelenos… More >>

• MOST EXPERIENCED ARTISTS

  McGroarty Arts Center

  The former home of John McGroarty (journalist, playwright, poet laureate and congressman) is now McGroarty Arts Center, providing classes in music, dance, theater, painting, drawing, ceramics, photography and writing. Program levels range from preschoolers to seniors, and all at a very low cost. Check the center’s calendar for art sales and concerts. This historic Tujunga “rock house” is also just… More >>

• Best Place to Commune With Your Spirit Animal

  Ernest E. Debs Regional Park

  One of the Eastside’s best-kept secrets, Ernest E. Debs Regional Park is 282 acres of dense, arroyo wilderness, teeming with swooping hawks, towering eucalyptus and meandering trails, most of them leading to utterly epic downtown views. Home of an Audubon center, a quiet hilltop pond filled with turtles and tadpoles and some of the most beautiful hiking spots you’ll find… More >>

• Best bob, stage and puppeteers (1963)

  Bob Baker Marionettes

  For nearly half a century, puppet master Bob Baker has been entertaining people of all ages at his marionette theater near downtown. The native Angeleno first became interested in puppetry at age 8, before launching a long and successful career in animation. In 1963, he founded Bob Baker Marionettes with his late partner, Alton Wood, and in 2009, the City… More >>

• Best Hotel That’s Actually a Bar, Restaurant, Theater and Residential Loft Space

  Alexandria Hotel

  If you’re searching for the ghosts of old “Los An-je-leez,” that paradise of re-created Eastern Anglo rectitude, opulence and taste displayed in such films as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, head downtown to the Alexandria Hotel. Built in 1906, today the imposingly dense, wide-shouldered eight-story Alexandria building is home to a range of attractions. It is the location of a vibrant,… More >>

• Everybody Loves Largo

  Largo

  For over a decade, the tiny club space on Fairfax that housed Largo regularly packed in audiences for some of the greatest music and comedy shows in town. Owner Mark Flanagan remodeled the venue in 1996 and programmed a constant slate of terrific musicians — most notably singer-songwriters including Aimee Mann, the late Elliott Smith and Friday-night house maestro Jon… More >>

• Best Morbid Museum

  Museum of Death

  Originally located in San Diego, the Museum of Death moved to its current Hollywood location in the ’90s. The grisly collection includes photos from the Black Dahlia and Charles Manson crime scenes, continuously running films (a recruitment video from the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, an embalmer’s how-to, footage of actual deaths), the art of serial killers John Wayne Gacy and… More >>

• Best Itty-Bitty Trees

  Huntington’s bonsai courtyard

  The shrunken trees at the Huntington Gardens are older than dirt. Enclosed by Japanese-style cedar fences built without nails, and rising up improbably out of shallow pots, the bonsai trees are horticultural masterworks. The Huntington’s bonsai courtyard, built in 1968 and expanded last February, is home to the Golden State Bonsai Federation’s southern collection. Here, you’ll find not only solitary… More >>

• Best Historic Neighborhood

  Angelino Heights

  In a nice bit of nomenclature irony — perhaps bordering on the sarcastic, if one were so inclined — the L.A. neighborhood featuring the most consistent concentration of East Coast–style, Victorian wooden houses is called Angelino Heights. To the jaundiced eye, the only things “Angelino” about the enclave are the views of downtown’s skyscrapers, its location hugging the 101 freeway… More >>

• Best Eastside lagoon (1965)

  La Laguna de San Gabriel at Vincent Lugo Park

  La Laguna de San Gabriel at Vincent Lugo Park is also known as Monster Park, due to numerous vibrant, large-scale creatures that serve as part of a children’s playground. Its designer, Benjamin Dominguez, was born in Mexico. He moved his family to the U.S. in 1956 and began specializing in artistic cement work. After creating imaginative play structures in Whittier… More >>

• Best Old-School Roller Rink (1950)

  Moonlight Rollerway

  Modern skate culture belongs to the Rollerbladers and skateboarders of the world. For those of us old enough to remember Xanadu and the pleasures of the vintage roller rink, however, quad-skating will always hold a romantic, even Proustian appeal. Today the roller rink is nearly an extinct species. But luckily for local nostalgists, there’s the beautifully preserved Moonlight Rollerway in… More >>

• Best Stiffs & Drinks

  Bigfoot Lodge West

  With the relatively recent return of cocktail bars that look like your grandfather’s game room, it seems taxidermy has become a hot commodity for any up-and-coming barkeep (don’t tell PETA). The Seven Grand has a hunting scene in its stairway, and who can forget Little Pedro’s (RIP) stuffed polar bear? But when it comes to dead stuff in bars, Bigfoot… More >>

• Best House That Quentin Saved (1978)

  New Beverly Cinema

  Having already been a vaudeville theater, a nightclub called Slapsie Maxie’s and various movie house incarnations from foreign films to porn, the New Beverly Cinema opened for business in 1978. Owner Sherman Torgan operated the theater for nearly three decades as a premier revival house featuring the gamut of films, from Hollywood classics to art-house fare to blockbusters, while elsewhere… More >>

• Best Hotel for Munchkin Debauchery (1924)

  Culver Hotel

  Opened in 1924, the Culver Hotel entered the annals of cinematic notoriety in 1939 for housing all 124 of the “little people” who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. Wild stories emerged — “Munchkins Run Riot!” — augmented by claims of an underground tunnel from the hotel to the soundstage, though only one case of drunken disorderliness was actually… More >>

• Best Former Missile Launch Site Turned Viewpoint

  A98C

  From 1956 to 1968, the spooks and bigwigs in the U.S. Army called it A98C, one of 16 heavily patrolled NIKE missile sites that protected Los Angeles during the Cold War from widely feared attack by the former evil empire, the Soviet Union. Tucked just above quiet suburban Encino and various celebrity homes about two miles west of the 405… More >>

• Favorite Old-Time Movie House (1923)

  Vista Theatre

  It’s OK to dig the ArcLight or Laemmle’s Sunset 5. Please, go ahead and take comfort in the Landmark Westside Pavilion. But sometimes you gotta hit one of the original, independently owned single-screen movie houses, a place that hearkens back to the days when little theaters dotted the landscape and the whole town came together so that young couples could… More >>

• Best Tinseltown Cowboy Experience (1926)

  William S. Hart Ranch and Museum

  Walt Disney donated a herd of bison to the William S. Hart Ranch and Museum in 1962. Their descendants mostly congregate on a smelly knoll swatting flies with their tails, with just a metal fence separating visitors from these once wild, now completely languid beasts. The museum is the actual ranch, built in 1926, where the famous cowboy movie star… More >>

• Best Place to LARP an Episode of “Scooby Doo” (1912)

  Old Griffith Park Zoo

  Tucked away in a secluded canyon in the park beckons the old Griffith Park Zoo, a quiet haven of peace and high-quality strangeness. Built in 1912, the old zoo is several acres of grimy, dark cages set amid boulder-lined grottoes once home to lions, tigers, bears, etc. (The animal collection eventually outgrew the site and the zoo moved to its… More >>

• Best Intelligent Escape From Mainstream Film (1975)

  Los Angeles Filmforum

  In 1922, Grauman’s Egyptian hosted Hollywood’s first theatrical film premiere with a screening of Robin Hood. Today, Los Angeles Filmforum holds weekly Sunday-night presentations in the Egyptian’s more intimate 77-seat Steven Spielberg Theatre. L.A.’s longest continually operating experimental film series, Filmforum screens rare, independent gems that challenge the boundary between film and art, including documentaries, animation, video art and other… More >>

• Best Playground for All

  Shane’s Inspiration

  Shane’s Inspiration, located near the merry-go-round in Griffith Park, is the largest universally accessible playground in the country, and was the first of its kind in the western United States, making it possible for children with physical challenges to play alongside those without. More than just swings and slides, Shane’s fosters the imagination, featuring a mock airline jetway, a space… More >>

• Best Design Workshop

  Eames Workshop

  For appreciators and collectors of top-notch, modern American furniture and product design, husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames are the very pinnacle of perfection. Rarely does there exist one gold-standard brand that carries so much weight in the name alone. Their following is beyond fanatical. Just whisper “Eames” in any crowd of well-heeled aesthetes and watch feet stop, eyeballs bulge… More >>

• Best Geek and Ye Shall Find

  Meltdown Comics

  Meltdown Comics has been one of L.A.’s premier comic-book sellers for almost two decades, but in that time — particularly in the last few years — it has evolved into so much more. Opened in 1992 by Gaston Dominguez-Letelier and Ilia Carson-Letelier, the Hollywood location is a spacious haven for lovers of comics and memorabilia, crammed with titles both popular… More >>

• Best Resource for Reading About Classic Hollywood

  Margaret Herrick Library

  No place in Los Angeles reveals the limitations of the Internet quite like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library. The Herrick bills itself as “the world’s preeminent cinema research facility,” and the collection is certainly comprehensive, including photos, audio recordings, scripts, letters, costume and production-design drawings, storyboards, sheet music and the personal papers of such… More >>

• Best Ghost Town

  Mentryville

  It’s a place that shouldn’t exist in Los Angeles County but does. Mentryville, the faded oil boom town nestled in the hills about four miles east of the 5 freeway in Newhall, sits at the end of Pico Canyon Road. The road through town has been blocked off since a flood assaulted Mentryville in 2003. There’s a barn, a 13-room… More >>

• Best Nature Escape From the Big City (1956)

  El Dorado Nature Center

  The original “El Dorado” was a semimythical city in South America, a place purported to be full of gold and precious worldly fortune, a kind of paradise on Earth. Similarly, El Dorado Nature Center in northeastern Long Beach is a local bit of paradise, although instead of gold and financial riches it promises bountiful tranquility and the riches of nature.… More >>

• Best Creative Bankers

  Burbank Senior Artists Colony

  The Burbank Senior Artists Colony is a residential community for creative elderly citizens, whose energy and ideas are a joy for visitors to see. The public gets a chance to explore the place once a year during the holiday season when the colony holds an open house, exhibition and fundraiser showcasing the work of residents. Inside are music, dance and… More >>

• Best Urban Art Park

  Barnsdall Art Park

  High above the urban milieu of the Hollywood and Vermont intersection, Barnsdall Art Park is almost Japanese in its clean and tidy aesthetic. Donated to the city in 1927 by live-theater impresario and philanthropist Aline Barnsdall, the grassy, tree-lined park and arts complex sits atop Olive Hill, an East Hollywood topographical aberration that looms over the Rite-Aid- and Fatburger-anchored strip… More >>

• Best Hole in the Valley

  Vanalden Cave

  People forget that the San Fernando Valley was formed by powerful geologic and tectonic forces over millennia, leaving behind many quirky features. One is the Vanalden Cave, well known to locals in Tarzana who through the decades have etched its soft, mostly sandstone walls with messages, graffiti and modern-day hieroglyphics. This is not a hike, and not really exercise, so… More >>

• BEST ICONIC RESTAURANT STATUE (1969)

  Chicken Boy - CLOSED

  Chicken Boy, the giant man-chicken statue holding a bucket of what is presumably fried chicken atop a Highland Park building, has been through quite a lot since his initial erection. That was back in 1969, when he first came to rest above — what else? — Chicken Boy Fried Chicken on Broadway between Fourth and Fifth streets. He became wildly… More >>

• Best Opportunity to Fondle Barack Obama Without Getting Arrested

  Madame Tussauds

  My plan was to grab the president’s crotch. I was intrigued with doing something I could never get away with in the real world. But as I stood next to Mr. Obama, it seemed disrespectful. So I grabbed his leg. I wasn’t the only one taking liberties with these wax folk: A guy posed with his hand on Britney Spears’… More >>

• Best Art Deco (1928)

  James Oviatt Building

  An Art Deco highrise stands adjacent to downtown jewelry wholesalers, warehouses and Pershing Square, seemingly untouched by the decades. The James Oviatt Building, circa 1928, was designed by the Los Angeles–based architectural firm of Walker & Eisen, a monument to its namesake, a wealthy dealer in men’s clothing. The son of a blacksmith, Oviatt worked as a window dresser before… More >>

• Best Mayan Revival-Style SRO (1924)

  Aztec Hotel

  Born in 1884, architect Robert Stacy-Judd worked during the Art Deco era, evoking Mayan and Aztec architecture in a style dubbed Mayan Revival. Stacy-Judd drafted plans for commercial buildings in his native England before designing the Aztec Hotel in Monrovia, his first commissioned work in the United States. Built as a hotel in 1924, the elaborate structure is located in… More >>

• Best Communal Tom Sawyer Fantasy

  Sturtevant’s Camp

  Hike down to Sturtevant’s Camp by bollowing a gurgling stream between oaks, spruce and ferns that surround cabins built between the 1890s and the 1920s. Past the camp, a trail guides visitors to Sturtevant Falls, a 50-foot narrow waterfall and swimming hole where families and pets picnic among the rocks and trees. Another nearby trail leads to Hermit Falls, a… More >>

• Best Unknown Botanic Garden (1961)

  South Coast Botanic Garden

  The often-overlooked South Coast Botanic Garden contains more than 150,000 trees and plants in its 87 acres, making it a worthy day trip for those who enjoy visits to the better-known Descanso Gardens and Huntington Library. Just to stroll the grounds, doing little more than gazing at the scenery, is incredibly therapeutic. Of course, there are rewarding directed activities as… More >>

• Best Make-believe Historical Shopping Mall (1936)

  Crossroads of the World

  In a region that features a green space called Elysian Park, a subdivision called Mount Olympus and a chain of suburbs called the Inland Empire, why not a repurposed old outdoor shopping mall called Crossroads of the World? What were the other suggested names: Center of the Known Universe? Valhalla on Earth? Nonetheless, Crossroads is a perfect example of the… More >>

• Best Example of 1970s Revolving Architecture (1976)

  BonaVista Lounge

  The ’70s fad of restaurants and cocktail lounges that rotate to display 360-degree views was mercifully short-lived. It’s undeniably awesome, however, that a relic from that age remains in downtown L.A., in the form of the BonaVista Lounge. Perched on the 34th floor of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the BonaVista is a bizarre and delightful throwback. With its low lighting… More >>

• Best Walk of Fame Alternative for Goths

  Karie Bible

  With Cinespia’s beyond-popular summer outdoor film series on hiatus for the season, Hollywood Forever Cemetery continues to be a year-round attraction thanks to film historian Karie Bible’s walking tours of the vaunted graveyard. The Cemetery of the Stars Tour gives you the basic overview, from the pond-side bench that marks Tyrone Powers’ final resting place to the often whiskey-bottle-cluttered grave… More >>

• Best Park Hidden in Plain Sight (1886)

  Elysian Park

  While Griffith Park gets the lion’s share of attention, most people know Elysian Park only as that area in which Dodger Stadium is embedded or as that weird, vaguely forested space that abuts the 110 and 5 freeways near downtown. Truth is, Elysian is an amazingly placid, lushly verdant and highly usable getaway in the middle of the city. Founded… More >>

• Best Bus Tour to the Dark Side

  Crime Bus Tours

  Do you wish you’d been old enough to go drinking with Charles Bukowski? Are you dying to visit Bay City as created by Raymond Chandler? How about “Crawling Down Cahuenga” in Tom Waits’ footsteps? Esotouric has just the tour for you. Esotouric grew out of the Crime Bus Tours, themselves an offshoot of the 1947project blog started by Kim Cooper… More >>

• Best Place Not Quite Open Yet (1930)

  5257

  5257 is a multipurpose Art Deco venue in West Adams with a rich L.A. history. Built in 1930 as a branch office of the First Citizens Savings Bank and Trust, the structure was converted to a neighborhood bar in the ’60s, when it was frequented by the likes of Ray Charles, Pearl Bailey and John Coltrane. Beginning in the early… More >>

• Best Historical Theater

  Powerhouse Theatre

  If historical importance were measured only by the degree to which a place has held off the encroaching hand (or backhoe) of economically driven “progress” and development, the Powerhouse Theatre would be practically a shoo-in for Most Historical. Built in 1910 as an Edison electrical plant, the Powerhouse’s distinct Mission Revival property on the Santa Monica/Venice border is now so… More >>

• WEIRDEST, COOLEST, MOST UNSILENT SILENT MOVIE THEATER (1942)

  Silent Movie Theatre

  For many years, the history of the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax was relatively non-tumultuous. Opened in 1942 by John Hampton — who hoped to use his personal collection of silent comedies to bring some joy to those struggling through the World War II years — it continued to operate well into the ’90s as the only remaining full-time silent… More >>

• Best Ends of the Earth (est. Miocene Period)

  Channel Islands National Park

  Called the North American Galápagos, the five of the eight islands of the Channel Islands archipelago that comprise the Channel Islands National Park (Anacapa, San Miguel, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa) lie between 14 and 38 miles off the coast. But they are a different world. Windswept grasslands.Thousand-foot peaks. Steep canyons. Sheer cliffs. Crashing surf. Empty beaches. Dumb-looking… More >>

• Best Timeless Childhood Classic (1937)

  Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round

  Certain activities define a generation — building model airplanes, playing Parcheesi, finally beating Super Mario 3 — but there are some that simply define childhood, no matter when you were born. Riding a carousel is one of those experiences, and the Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round is the place to do it in L.A. The merry-go-round has been spinning since 1937, churning… More >>

• Best Theater Close to “Home”

  A Noise Within

  Talk about being theater-close. Now it can be right outside your front door. After 19 years of leasing space in Glendale, A Noise Within has found a permanent home — with lots of neighbors. It’s precedent-setting: This may be the first mixed-use development of housing and a classic repertory theater company under one historical roof. The north side of the… More >>

• Best Historic Broadway Theater (1926)

  Orpheum Theatre

  The Orpheum Theatre opened in 1926 in Downtown’s Broadway Theater District, then home to the largest number of movie palaces in the United States. Named after the Greek god Orpheus, the theater was the fourth and last built by the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Early productions featured a young Judy Garland as well as the Marx Brothers, Fred Astaire, Duke Ellington… More >>

• Best Escape From Corporate Entertainment

  Historical Monument 157

  One of the more unusual venues in town, Historical Monument 157 keeps the underground eccentric. Beyond the iron fence and Ping-Pong table, the old Victorian mansion manages to stay standing, surrounded by blooming plants and random furniture. Walk around to the left, past another gate beside one of three old-school RVs parked in the back, and you’ll find dangling lights,… More >>