Los Angeles & Southern California - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [67]
PETERSEN AUTOMOTIVE MUSEUM
A four-story ode to the auto, the Petersen Automotive Museum (Map; 323-930-2277; www.petersen.org; 6060 Wilshire Blvd, Miracle Mile, Mid-City; adult/child/senior & student $10/3/5; 10am-6pm Tue-Sun; ) is a treat even to those who can’t tell a piston from a carburetor. Start by ambling along a fun streetscape that reveals LA as the birthplace of gas stations, billboards, strip malls, drive-in restaurants and drive-in movie theaters. Then head upstairs where it’s shiny cars galore, from vintage wheels to hot rods, movie cars to celebrity-owned rarities, presented in changing exhibits. Want to know how a combustion engine works? Find out one more floor up in the kid-oriented Discovery Center, where little ones also get to climb inside a 1910 Model T and pose as a motorcycle cop. Great photo-ops! Parking $6.
By the way, morbid trivia buffs might like to know that, in 1997, gangsta rapper Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down in his car outside the museum after leaving a Soul Train Music Awards party.
CRAFT & FOLK ART MUSEUM
Zulu ceramics, Japanese katagami paper art, Palestinian embroidery – cultural creativity has infinite ways of expression as you’ll discover at this well-respected museum (Map; 323-937-4230; www.cafam.org; 5814 Wilshire Blvd, Miracle Mile, Mid-City; adult/student & senior/child under 12 $5/3/free, 1st Wed of month free; 11am-5pm Tue, Wed & Fri, 11am-7pm Thu, noon-6pm Sat & Sun; ) where exhibits change every few months. Also check for upcoming kid-oriented workshops and storytelling sessions, usually held on Saturdays. The gift store is one of the best in town.
A+D MUSEUM
A + D = the Architecture + Design Museum (Map; 323-932-9393; www.aplusd.org; 5900 Wilshire Blvd, Miracle Mile, Mid-City; adult/senior & students $5/2.50; 10am-6pm Tue-Fri, 10-6pm Sat & Sun), a small Getty-sponsored space that keeps the finger on the pulse of emerging trends, people and products in the design and architecture community, both locally and beyond.
HANCOCK PARK & LARCHMONT VILLAGE
LA has gorgeous homes galore, but there’s nothing quite like the old-money mansions flanking the tree-lined streets of Hancock Park, a genteel neighborhood roughly bounded by Highland and Rossmore and Melrose and Wilshire. LA’s founding families, including the Doheny’s and Chandlers, hired famous architects to build their pads in the 1920s, and to this day low-profile celebrities such as Melanie Griffith, Antonio Banderas and Fred Savage make their homes here. It’s a lovely area for a stroll or a drive-through, especially around Christmas when houses sparkle in a sea of twinkling lights.
Wrap up your visit here with a cappuccino and a browse through tiny Larchmont Village (Map; Larchmont Blvd btwn Beverly Blvd & W 1st St; ), the neighborhood’s small-town America-style commercial strip. Keep an eye out for celebs – Paramount Studios is just up the street.
Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills cuts through Los Angeles like the grand dame of royal cruise ships. Glittering streets, chic boutiques and posh restaurants all sparkle on her haughty decks with the security and charm befitting the securely monied. To tell the truth, though, the place feels like a deer park. It has no industry, no homeless people, an efficient police force, excellent schools, fancy hotels, more Ferraris per capita than anywhere else, 111 gardeners per sq mile and a median home value of $1.8 million.
Of course, Beverly Hills also has stars, mostly holed up in the hills and canyons north of Sunset Blvd. To find them, check out our tour in this book Click here, take a guided bus tour Click here or buy a map to the stars’ homes, for instance from Linda Welton’s Star Maps (Map) on the corner of Sunset Blvd and Baroda Dr.
These days, Beverly Hills’ wealth is actually mostly new-money, brought here by immigrants from Iran who’ve been settling here since the fall of the Shah some 30 years ago. About 25% of the 35,000 residents are of Iranian descent, which has spawned the moniker ‘Tehrangeles’. In March 2007, the city elected its first Iranian-born mayor, Jimmy