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Every neighborhood has one park that quietly does all the work. On the Beverly Hills side of town, that park is La Cienega Park. Not the biggest green space in Los Angeles, not the most famous, but ask the families within a two-mile radius where the kids learned to...

Type the name into a search bar and the suggestions tell the story before any article can. Is it open. What happened. Can you visit. The Marciano Art Foundation was, for a brief and genuinely exciting stretch, one of the most talked-about free art spaces in the city -...

The neon gives it away before anything else. Driving down Pico through Mid-City you pass a restored 1930s movie-house marquee, lit up like it is opening night in another century, except the sign is not announcing a film - it is announcing an art exhibition. That is...

You know a venue is special when people describe the building before they mention the show. That happens constantly with the Saban Theatre. Ask someone about a concert they caught there and they will start with the dome, the gilded ceiling, the way the place glows on...

Some buildings just feel like they have stories in the walls. The Fine Arts Theatre is one of them. Tucked along Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, this single-screen movie palace has been running since 1936, and it has the kind of art-deco bones they simply do not...

Something big is coming to this city, and you can already feel people planning around it. The world cup events rolling into Los Angeles will turn an ordinary summer into the loudest, most crowded, most flag-covered stretch the city has seen in years. Matches, yes -...

Ask any LA football fan about July and you will get the same answer. That is when the big European clubs come over, dust off their squads, and play preseason friendlies in front of crowds that have waited all summer. The soccer international champions cup has been the...

There is a particular kind of summer when a city stops being a collection of neighborhoods and turns into one big crowd, all watching the same thing. That summer is coming. When the FIFA cup football tournament rolls into town, Los Angeles is going to be one of those...

There are not many places where a kid can crane their neck up at an actual spacecraft that flew to orbit twenty-five times, and then walk a few steps to touch a tornado made of air, and then watch fish drift through a kelp forest tank two storeys tall. The California...

Most people remember exactly one thing from their first visit to the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, and it is usually the dinosaurs. Three Tyrannosaurus rex specimens, arranged together as a growth series — a baby, a juvenile, a sub-adult — in a hall built to let...

There are museums you visit and museums that visit you back. The Museum of Tolerance is the second kind. You walk in expecting a building full of exhibits and you leave carrying something heavier and more useful than information — a changed way of looking at how...

You notice the building before you know what it is. A wall of swooping stainless-steel ribbons wrapped around a bright red box, sitting on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax like something that landed rather than something that was built. The Petersen Automotive...

There is a corner of Wilshire Boulevard where the ground bubbles. Not metaphorically — literally bubbles, slow black asphalt pushing up through the surface in the middle of a manicured park, releasing methane in lazy pops that smell faintly of a freshly paved road on...

There's a moment that happens at dusk on Wilshire Boulevard when the 202 cast-iron streetlamps on the museum plaza begin to assert themselves against the darkening sky. During the day, the LACMA lights feel historical — weathered columns with their own provenance,...

May doesn't announce itself in Los Angeles the way other transitions do. There's no dramatic weather shift, no obvious marker that the school year is tightening toward its end. What changes is the tempo. The preschool calendar gets busier — end-of-year performances,...