Culture in Los Angeles

The 1939 May Company building on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, converted into a film museum that opened in 2021. Permanent galleries explain how films get made. Rotating exhibitions share the building with two cinemas that run their own program. Tickets are sold at the door as well as online and the galleries take about two hours if you are moving.

Mon and Wed, Thu, Sun, 10am to 6pm. Fri and Sat, 10am to 8pm. Closed Tuesday

A house and garden on the point between Malibu Pier and the lagoon, covered inside and out in Malibu tile, with carved teak doors and bottle-glass windows. The grounds are free and open from eight in the morning until sunset, and you can walk them without going inside. The small museum next to the house is free as well and the guided walk through the house costs seven dollars.

Grounds daily 8am to sunset. Museum Wednesday to Saturday 11am to 3pm. House tours Wednesday to Saturday, on the hour 11am to 2pm. Closed in rain

A two-car funicular that has climbed the Bunker Hill slope since 1901, moved one block south in 1996 and returned to service in 2017 after a long shutdown. The ride is under a minute and the fare is a dollar fifty, or seventy-five cents with a TAP card. The lower station sits beside Grand Central Market and the upper one opens onto California Plaza.

Daily, 6:45am to 10pm

Pomona College's art museum, on Bonita at the north edge of Claremont Village, and free to anybody who walks in. The galleries rotate through the college collection and visiting shows, and they stay open until eight on Thursdays, which is unusual for a campus museum. On the first Saturday of the month the hours stretch for the Claremont Art Walk.

Thu, 11am to 8pm. Fri to Sun, 11am to 6pm. Closed Mon to Wed

A former Red Car trolley yard off Olympic that the city turned into a complex of more than twenty galleries, all free to walk into. The buildings are corrugated sheds and the parking is on site. Santa Monica opened its own municipal gallery here in April 2026.

Most galleries Tuesday to Saturday, roughly 11am to 5pm or 6pm. Closed Sunday and Monday. Individual galleries vary

The only natural geothermal spring still running in central Los Angeles, drilled in the 1910s and turned into a bathhouse. Hot and cold mineral pools, a steam sauna and a dry herbal sauna, with separate facilities for men and women. Water comes up at around 105 degrees at a quarter of a million gallons a day. Bring nothing; they hand you what you need.

Daily 10am to 8pm

A poetry center founded in 1968 that occupies the old Venice city hall on Venice Boulevard. The bookshop carries what it says is the largest selection of new poetry titles for sale anywhere, and the archive behind it holds more than forty thousand small press and limited edition volumes. Readings and workshops run in the evenings.

Bookshop Thursday to Saturday 1pm to 6pm in winter, Thursday to Sunday 1pm to 6pm from Independence Day to Labor Day. Readings run later, check the calendar

Built in 1893 to a design by draftsman George Wyman, with a glass roof over a court of open-cage elevators and wrought iron stairs. It is a working office building, so the public sees the ground floor and the first landing. Admission is free and the whole visit takes ten minutes.

Mon to Fri 9am to 5pm. Sat 10am to 5pm. Closed Sunday

A state museum in Exposition Park with three galleries and a theater wrapped around a glass-roofed sculpture court. Admission is always free and no ticket is needed, so you can give it forty minutes or two hours depending on when your show is. The program leans contemporary, with exhibitions on Black art and history in California that change several times a year.

Tue to Sat, 10am to 5pm. Sun, 11am to 5pm. Closed Mon

Rafael Moneo's cathedral on Temple Street, finished in 2002, built out of ochre concrete with almost no right angles and lit through alabaster rather than glass. You enter along a long ambulatory rather than straight up an aisle. It is open to anyone to walk in and sit, and it costs nothing.

Monday to Friday 6:30am to 6pm, Saturday 9am to 6pm, Sunday 7am to 6pm

A city library rebuilt in 2002 with an exterior clad in titanium panels, which is not a thing any other library in the county did. Inside there is a full-size saltwater aquarium, a life-size model of a Tyrannosaurus, and an art collection hung through the reading areas. Anyone can walk in without a card. It sits in the Cerritos Civic Center, a short way up Bloomfield from the performing arts center.

Mon to Fri, 11am to 7pm. Sat, 11am to 5pm. Closed Sun

A twenty-two foot fiberglass figure with a boy's body and a chicken's head, made in 1969 for a fried chicken stand on Broadway downtown. When the stand closed the statue sat in storage for twenty-three years until designer Amy Inouye bought it and put it on the roof of her Future Studio on Figueroa in 2007. It is a marked stop on Historic Route 66.

Visible from the sidewalk at any hour. The gallery below keeps limited and irregular hours

A free storefront museum on West Compton Boulevard holding the city's own art and its own account of itself, with shows that rotate rather than a fixed display. Admission costs nothing and the whole visit fits in half an hour. It keeps daytime hours only, Tuesday through Saturday.

Tue to Sat, 10am to 3pm. Closed Sunday and Monday

Charles and Ray Eames built this in 1949 as Case Study House No. 8 and lived in it for the rest of their lives. Two steel-framed boxes sit in a meadow of eucalyptus on a bluff above the ocean, the industrial frame ordered out of a catalog and then filled in with colored panels. The January 2025 Palisades fire did not burn it. It came through with smoke and fire-retardant contamination, closed about five months, and reopened in late July 2025. Since then the visit has included Charles and Ray's private studio, which had never been open to the public.

Grounds and Studio Visit runs April 5 to October 31, with slots at 10am, 11am, 1:30pm and 2:30pm

Claud Beelman's thirteen-story tower, opened on September 12, 1930 after nine months of building, clad in glossy turquoise terra cotta trimmed in deep blue and gold. A four-sided clock tower carries the word EASTERN in neon and is topped by a smokestack with four stylized flying buttresses. The sidewalks on the Broadway and Ninth Street sides are multi-colored terrazzo laid in zigzags and chevrons, and the recessed two-story entrance holds a blue and gold terra cotta sunburst.

Sidewalk, at any hour

A market on First Street, open since 1968, with produce and butchers on the ground floor, stalls selling boots and records in the middle, and a floor at the top given over to restaurants where mariachi and norteño groups play to the tables. You pay by the song or you sit near someone who is paying. People call it El Mercadito and they mean the top floor.

Daily, roughly 10am to 8pm, with the upstairs restaurants and music running latest on Fri to Sun

The 1935 observatory on the south face of Mount Hollywood, in copper-domed Art Deco, and it has been free to walk into since the day it opened. Evening telescope viewing is available. A Foucault pendulum stands in the entry, and the terrace takes in the basin from downtown to the ocean. The building runs until 10pm, which is later than almost anything else of this kind in the city.

Tuesday to Friday noon to 10pm, Saturday and Sunday 10am to 10pm, closed Monday

UCLA's museum at Wilshire and Westwood, free to everyone with no ticket and no reservation. The courtyard at the center is open off the street and people sit in it without going into a gallery at all. Exhibitions turn over often enough that a second visit is not a repeat.

Tuesday to Sunday 11am to 6pm. Closed Monday. Public programs in the evening run later than the galleries

A 1927 building that held a pharmacy upstairs and eight bowling lanes below during Prohibition. The 1933 Group restored it and reopened in 2016, uncovering the bow truss ceiling and a 1930s mural. Lanes go as two-hour booked packages and the bar takes walk-ins.

Bar Mon to Thu 5pm to midnight, Fri 5pm to 2am, Sat noon to 2am, Sun noon to midnight. All ages before 8pm, 21 and over after

A hundred and twenty-seven years of Los Angeles buried behind a wall on Santa Monica Boulevard, backing directly onto the Paramount lot. Self-guided visits are free and you can walk the lake and the mausoleum on your own. Johnny Ramone and Judy Garland are here. Chris Cornell is too, along with a working funeral business.

Monday to Friday 8:30am to 5pm, Saturday and Sunday 8:30am to 4:30pm. Free to walk in

A seventeen-ton bronze bell given by South Korea in 1976, hung in a painted stone pavilion on the bluff at Angels Gate Park. It looks straight out at the harbor mouth and Catalina on a clear day, and the lawn around it is mostly people walking dogs. The bell itself is rung only five times a year, so do not go expecting to hear it.

Mon to Sat, 9:30am to 5:30pm. Closed Sun

Bertram Goodhue's 1926 building, with sphinxes on the outside and a tiled pyramid on the roof, joined in 1993 to Norman Pfeiffer's Tom Bradley Wing and its eight-story atrium hung with oversized chandeliers. Free docent tours of the art and architecture run most days and take an hour.

Monday to Thursday 10am to 8pm, Friday and Saturday 9:30am to 5:30pm, Sunday 1pm to 5pm

The last of the great American railway terminals, opened in May 1939 to a Donald and John Parkinson design that blends Spanish Colonial, Mission Revival and Art Deco into something usually called Mission Moderne. The main hall runs about 140 feet by 80, under six bronze Art Deco chandeliers that weigh over 3,000 pounds apiece, with thirty-foot windows and red quarry tile underfoot. There are 254 original-pattern wooden chairs and nobody minds if you sit in one. It stays open from 4am to 1am.

Daily 4am to 1am

Rudolph Schindler built this for himself in 1921 and 1922 on Kings Road, and it is the house most of Southern California modernism is descended from. It now runs as the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, with contemporary shows installed in the house and its courtyards rather than in a gallery built for the purpose.

Wednesday to Sunday 11am to 6pm, closed Monday and Tuesday

The only museum in the country given over to modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art, opened on Alamitos Avenue in 1996 in a building that was a 1920s silent film studio and later a roller rink. Shows run to painting and sculpture alongside photography and video. There is a sculpture garden out the back that you can sit in. Admission is fifteen dollars and free to everyone on Sunday.

Wed to Sun, 11am to 6pm. Closed Mon and Tue

Richard Neutra's own house, built in 1932 as the VDL Research House on the east bank of the Silver Lake Reservoir, with a Garden House added at the end of the decade. A fire in 1963 left only the Garden House and the original basement, and Neutra rebuilt the main residence with his son and partner Dion, adding floors and a penthouse solarium on top. Cal Poly Pomona's College of Environmental Design holds it now and opens it to the public on Saturdays.

Saturdays 11am to 3pm, closed the rest of the week

A regional branch of the Los Angeles Public Library a block off Lankershim, named for Amelia Earhart, who lived in North Hollywood before her last flight. It is a full regional branch rather than a small one, so there is a proper periodicals section, air conditioning and tables you can sit at for an hour without buying anything. Open Sunday afternoons, which very little else here is.

Mon to Thu, 10am to 8pm. Fri and Sat, 9:30am to 5:30pm. Sun, 1pm to 5pm

A curved brown building at Colorado and Orange Grove holding a collection that runs from Dutch painting to Degas to South and Southeast Asian sculpture, with a sculpture garden behind it built around a pond. It is small enough to do properly in ninety minutes. Admission is free to everyone on the first Friday of the month from four until seven, and always free for students with ID and anyone eighteen or under.

Mon, noon to 5pm. Closed Tue and Wed. Thu, noon to 5pm. Fri and Sat, noon to 7pm. Sun, noon to 5pm. Last entry 4:15pm, or 6:15pm Fri and Sat

The county branch library on Main, a modern building with a large reading floor, free wi-fi and a rotating exhibit wall. It is a genuine place to spend forty minutes before a film rather than a fallback, and it is the only free indoor seat in Old Town that does not require buying something. Open until 8pm four nights a week, which is later than most of the street.

Mon to Thu, 9am to 8pm. Fri, 10am to 6pm. Sat, 10am to 5pm. Sun, 1pm to 5pm

The oldest LGBTQ archive in the United States, on West Adams in a building that used to be a fraternity house. The ground floor runs free exhibitions drawn from the collection, which covers roughly a century of material, and the reading area upstairs is open to anyone who asks. Visits are short by design and the staff will tell you what is on the walls.

Tue, 10am to 5pm. Wed, 11am to 5pm. Thu to Sat, 10am to 5pm. Closed Sun and Mon

Four floors of cars on Wilshire at Fairfax, behind the red ribbon facade. Under the building is the Vault, a few hundred rare vehicles including prototypes and concepts that never went into production. It is ticketed separately from general admission and cameras are not allowed down there.

Daily 10am to 6pm. Last entry 4:30pm and the last call for the Vault is 5pm.

El Ranchito, the adobe Pío Pico built beside the San Gabriel River and lived in until 1892, after serving as the last Mexican governor of Alta California. Thirteen acres with a fifteen-room adobe, a beehive bread oven and a dovecote still standing. Admission is free and a ranger will walk you through the house on weekends without an appointment.

Thu to Sun, 9am to 3:30pm. Closed Mon to Wed and on major holidays

Thirty-nine lanes on Fourth Street, open until 2am every night of the year. Walk-in games run about six or seven dollars at night with five-dollar shoe rental, and there are pool tables, pinball, a bar and a kitchen behind the lanes. The free lot under the building is tight but it is free.

Mon to Thu, 1pm to 2am. Fri to Sun, noon to 2am

The oldest museum in Los Angeles, built into the hillside above Arroyo Seco and now run by the Autry. Admission is free and it opens one day a week while the building is still being rehabilitated, so the gallery space on view is small.

Saturdays only, 10am to 4pm. Free

Pierre Koenig's 1960 glass box cantilevered off a ridge above the Sunset Strip, and the subject of the Julius Shulman photograph of two women sitting in a lit corner over the whole grid at night. The Stahl family still owns it and still runs the visits themselves, which is why the rules are so particular.

Reservation-only timed tours released in roughly half-month tranches, afternoon and evening

The site of a February 1967 demonstration against a police raid on a gay bar, more than two years before Stonewall. It is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument 939 and became California Historical Landmark 1063 in 2022, the first state landmark recognizing California's LGBTQ history. It trades today as a neighborhood bar and restaurant at Sunset Junction.

Weekdays 4pm to 2am. Weekends from 2pm

Eli and Edythe Broad's collection in a perforated concrete shell on Grand Avenue, open since 2015. General admission is free, and the third floor holds the postwar and contemporary work the collection is known for. Thursday through Saturday it stays open until 8pm.

Tue and Wed 11am to 5pm. Thu and Fri 11am to 8pm. Sat 10am to 8pm. Sun 10am to 6pm. Closed Monday

Charles and Henry Greene designed this in 1908 for David and Mary Gamble of Procter & Gamble, and it is the American Arts and Crafts house everything else gets measured against: joinery left visible, sleeping porches, art glass in the front door. The Gambles' family deeded it to the City of Pasadena in 1966 and it is now a National Historic Landmark run by the Gamble House Conservancy. The exterior and gardens are free to walk around whenever the site is open.

Open Tuesday and Thursday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm, closed Monday and Wednesday

An 1844 adobe on Calabasas Road that Basque rancher Miguel Leonis remodelled into a Monterey-style two-story house in the 1870s, now kept as a working ranch with longhorn cattle, sheep, goats and a blacksmith shop in the yard. It was declared Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1, the first thing the city ever designated, and the campaign to save it in 1962 is what produced the designation system. The Plummer House, moved here from Hollywood, sits on the same lot and serves as the visitor center.

Sat, 10am to 4pm. Sun, 1pm to 4pm. Closed Monday to Friday

A small free museum on the USC campus, founded in 1939, with a permanent holding of Dutch and Flemish paintings and a changing program of contemporary shows. Two galleries, no ticket, and it takes half an hour unless something holds you. It keeps the university calendar, so it shuts for holidays and through the summer.

Tue to Fri, noon to 5pm. Sat, noon to 4pm. Closed Sun and Mon. Shut for university holidays and in summer

Two aircraft hangars at Van Nuys Airport filled with the San Fernando Valley's own wreckage: original neon from restaurants that closed decades ago, the Palomino Club sign, yearbooks, menus, western clothing, vintage BMX bikes and a playable arcade. Tommy Gelinas started collecting in 2013 and moved into the hangars in November 2018. Weekends only, and admission is ten dollars.

Sat and Sun, 10am to 3pm. Closed Mon to Fri

The oldest library building the Los Angeles Public Library owns, put up in 1913 with Carnegie money and still a working branch. It sits on the edge of a small park with a reading area under high windows and a local history shelf. Anyone can walk in, sit down and stay, which is worth knowing on a hot afternoon in this part of the city.

Mon and Wed, 10am to 8pm. Tue and Thu, noon to 8pm. Fri and Sat, 9:30am to 5:30pm. Closed Sun

A 1923 single-screen theater at the fork of Sunset and Hollywood, bought by Quentin Tarantino in 2021 and reopened in November 2023 after a restoration. It projects film only, 35mm and 70mm, with no digital. A twenty-seat second screen was added in 2024.

Daily, roughly 11am to 11pm depending on the day's program. Sunday runs 10am to midnight, Monday and Thursday close at 10pm

Seventeen sculptures an Italian tile setter named Sabato Rodia built alone in his back yard on 107th Street between 1921 and 1954, out of steel rod, mortar, broken bottles and tile he picked up on the job. The tallest is nearly a hundred feet. The towers stand behind a fence you can see through from the sidewalk at any hour, and the arts center next door runs guided tours on a short weekly schedule. It is a State Historic Park and a National Historic Landmark.

Grounds and arts center, Wed to Sun. Guided tours Thu and Fri, 11am to 3pm, closed 12:30pm to 1:30pm, last tour at 3pm. Visible from 107th Street at any hour