When I first moved to California I lived in corporate housing in Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) in the Watermarke Tower Apartments, a spectacular building at 9th and Figueroa. There was an outdoor pool on ninth floor that was used for photoshoots. I believe that Skee-Lo was temporarily staying in a room at the same while he was filming the first season of The Voice. I rode the LA Metro for my commute to Universal City. Sadly, I only lived here for a month. DTLA may not wow a visitor with excitement but it’s still a busy urban core for a resident. There’s high rises, many with rooftop decks, and the Staples Center brings a steady stream of Angelinos to the area.
I always felt the Downtown in Downtown LA was a bit of a misnomer. Downtown from what exactly? Where’s uptown? Is there a midtown? If you ever look at Los Angeles on a map, you’ll see that Downtown Los Angeles is on the eastern side of the metropolitan area. The next city over is East Los Angeles, which despite its name, is not part of Los Angeles. Instead, Los Angeles spreads west from its urban core, gobbling up neighborhoods all the way to Venice before heading up the Sepulveda Pass, into the San Fernando Valley. It has a weird southern offshoot to the Los Angeles Pier area - that should be Downtown LA.
While I don’t believe DTLA offers a tourist any incentive for a closer examination, and yes I don’t believe that Oliveria Street, the original Los Angeles community founded by the Spanish is worth visiting, I do believe DTLA is an area that Angelinos should visit more often and venture out beyond the Staples Center and convention center. If (or when) I move back to Los Angeles, I’d strongly consider living in DTLA if I couldn’t find a reasonably priced unit in the South Bay.
DTLA is conducive to a self-guided walking tour—just plan properly so there’s no backtracking. The ideal starting destination is Union Station, an LA Metro terminus/interchange and the city’s primary Amtrak station. Union Station is a Spanish Adobe style architecture with large, comfortable, brown chair in the Amtrak waiting room—which unfortunately are only available to Amtrak ticket holders. Near the street entrance is a microbrewery.
Across the street from Union Station is the Olvera Street area. Instead of walking through this area, stay on the street and go to Philippe’s, Home of the Original French Dip. It’s like the Pat’s Steaks of Los Angeles and anything dipped in au jus sauce will taste pretty decent. From Philippe’s, it’s a walk backwards one block to an Olvera Street entrance.
I’ve been to Olvera Street twice and have found it to be a bit…kitschy. If you need a luchador mask or other Mexican paraphernalia for an amazing Cinco de Mayo party, the stalls here have everything you need. Supposedly, there’s a few decent Mexican restaurants along this walking street…but I’m not buying that. Both times I’ve walked through this area, I’ve eaten at Philippe’s first with no regrets. There’s a plaza at the entrance near Union Station. Mexican band music plays and I’ve sat and watched dancers for thirty minutes before moving on to the next section of DTLA.
I always felt the Downtown in Downtown LA was a bit of a misnomer. Downtown from what exactly? Where’s uptown? Is there a midtown? If you ever look at Los Angeles on a map, you’ll see that Downtown Los Angeles is on the eastern side of the metropolitan area. The next city over is East Los Angeles, which despite its name, is not part of Los Angeles. Instead, Los Angeles spreads west from its urban core, gobbling up neighborhoods all the way to Venice before heading up the Sepulveda Pass, into the San Fernando Valley. It has a weird southern offshoot to the Los Angeles Pier area - that should be Downtown LA.
While I don’t believe DTLA offers a tourist any incentive for a closer examination, and yes I don’t believe that Oliveria Street, the original Los Angeles community founded by the Spanish is worth visiting, I do believe DTLA is an area that Angelinos should visit more often and venture out beyond the Staples Center and convention center. If (or when) I move back to Los Angeles, I’d strongly consider living in DTLA if I couldn’t find a reasonably priced unit in the South Bay.
DTLA is conducive to a self-guided walking tour—just plan properly so there’s no backtracking. The ideal starting destination is Union Station, an LA Metro terminus/interchange and the city’s primary Amtrak station. Union Station is a Spanish Adobe style architecture with large, comfortable, brown chair in the Amtrak waiting room—which unfortunately are only available to Amtrak ticket holders. Near the street entrance is a microbrewery.
Across the street from Union Station is the Olvera Street area. Instead of walking through this area, stay on the street and go to Philippe’s, Home of the Original French Dip. It’s like the Pat’s Steaks of Los Angeles and anything dipped in au jus sauce will taste pretty decent. From Philippe’s, it’s a walk backwards one block to an Olvera Street entrance.
I’ve been to Olvera Street twice and have found it to be a bit…kitschy. If you need a luchador mask or other Mexican paraphernalia for an amazing Cinco de Mayo party, the stalls here have everything you need. Supposedly, there’s a few decent Mexican restaurants along this walking street…but I’m not buying that. Both times I’ve walked through this area, I’ve eaten at Philippe’s first with no regrets. There’s a plaza at the entrance near Union Station. Mexican band music plays and I’ve sat and watched dancers for thirty minutes before moving on to the next section of DTLA.
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Los Angeles has the second best U.S. city hall I’ve ever seen—the first being Philadelphia. There’s a park in front of the Los Angeles city hall so it’s easy to snap a few photos then head a few blocks south to the Bradbury Building. The Bradbury Building has been featured in several movies and from the exterior it’s a bit of a headscratcher as to why—but then you enter the building, see the crazy stairs and balconies, snap tens of photos, and think, “the interior of this building would make a great scene for a movie.”
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Across the street from the Bradbury Building is the Grand Central Market. I was not impressed with this place when I first visited in 2011, it seemed like a dumpy version of Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market (few people, few stalls, those that were open seemed like duds) but in 2018 this place was rocking. Every stall seemed occupied. I even ordered some tacos. The food stalls did not seem to have a “vintage, been here for twenty years” quality serving a working crowd. but were rather upscale and catering towards a hipster crowd.
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Great cities have great parks and Griffith Park is Los Angeles’s entry into the Great City Park debate. Griffith Park is home to the famous Hollywood sign and Griffith Observatory. On another end of the park is the Los Angeles Zoo. It’s the sort of park you either want to drive through or take a serious hike through—it’s not a casual walking park. Since the park requires a car and serious hiking, it’s best to arrive early in the morning…so you don’t have an accidental, unintentional serious hike from where you park to an attraction like Griffith Observatory. I drove through the park one afternoon to visit the observatory and when the only parking spot I could find was downhill, a mile away, I kept driving. Early AM, sunrise at Griffith Observatory—that’s the time to visit.
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The feature of Los Angeles that bothers me the most is that despite there being great neighborhoods, there’s no neighborhoods, other than DTLA, that are truly walkable. There are huuuuge gaps between neighborhood commercial districts which makes it necessary to drive a car or take an Uber to go from one neighborhood to the next. An example, I love the quaintness of Larchmont Village—but you need to drive to and from here. I’ve walked from the Hollywood area down Sunset Boulevard all the way to Beverly Hills before—it’s an amazing walk but it’s a very, very, very long walk. Same with walking along Melrose Avenue and down Fairfax. If you are shopping at stores in this area the only thing more painful than the walk is trying to find parking every time you move your car.
Los Angeles may be it’s most walkable in the Los Feliz and Silverlake areas. I ate breakfast at Figaro Bistro then walked up Vermont and then back down Hillhurst Avenue. I love the traditional, prime of Hollywood area homes along palm tree lined streets. There’s themed restaurants like Ye Rustic Inn that are too tacky for any other city in the world but fit right in to the LA environment.
Los Angeles may be it’s most walkable in the Los Feliz and Silverlake areas. I ate breakfast at Figaro Bistro then walked up Vermont and then back down Hillhurst Avenue. I love the traditional, prime of Hollywood area homes along palm tree lined streets. There’s themed restaurants like Ye Rustic Inn that are too tacky for any other city in the world but fit right in to the LA environment.
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I then ate a second breakfast at Ma’am Sir, a Filipino restaurant if the name wasn’t obvious, on Sunset Boulevard on my way to Silver Lake and Echo Park. Silver Lake has cemented its status as one of LA’s hippest neighborhoods and I figured if there was a good neighborhood to walk though, this would be it. Ma’am Sir to Echo Park is a two-mile walk and…it’s a boring walk. I thought the walk would be similar to Abbott Kinney, Venice’s hip, off the tourist path, shopping street, but I was wrong. Shops and restaurants were too far and too in-between to make this a lazy stop and stroll. Then I had issues with catching a bus back to DTLA and told myself—no more self-guided walking tours of LA neighborhoods.
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The La Brea Tar Pits may be Los Angeles 's most overlooked, underappreciated attraction? How overlooked? How underappreciated? I worked across the street from the far puts for a year and never even walked past. It is a unique museum in that the tar pits remain active and the museum and pavilions are built around the pits. Inside the museum are skeletal remains that have bubbled up and out of the tar pits over the years.
The entrance to the museum has a large tar pit with a struggling baby elephant.
Other museums may have skeletons, this museum has the tomb. Leaves would cover and hide the tar. One animal would get stuck. A second animal would see an easy meal. That animal would get stuck and so forth.
The entrance to the museum has a large tar pit with a struggling baby elephant.
Other museums may have skeletons, this museum has the tomb. Leaves would cover and hide the tar. One animal would get stuck. A second animal would see an easy meal. That animal would get stuck and so forth.
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Next to the La Brea Tar Pits is LACMA which receives a ton of visitors to its very Instagrammable light post sculpture outfront. There's also a rock under a walk way - I mean how artistic is that?!?!?!
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When I rode the LA Metro for my commute to Universal City, I saw advertisement on the metro, encouraging riders to take the LA Metro to Los Angeles attractions. One said, ride the Metro to the Watts Towers. All I know about Watts is the neighborhood had some serious race riots back in the 1960s and I thought, naively, that the Watts Towers must be associated with or commemorate those events. I was wrong. The Watts Towers are Los Angeles’s equivalent to Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens and like every other Philadelphia to Los Angeles comparison I’ve made, the Watt’s Towers falls short of its Philadelphia counterpart. The Watts Tower story is simple—there is a guy who lived in Watts. He collected trash. He built a tower out to the trash. It’s a long way to visit, especially via Metro (and there’s still a fifteen minute walk from the Metro Station to the Watts Towers) to see a tower of trash.
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If you live in Los Angeles you need to watch the city’s two, great historical college sports teams in action – the UCLA Bruins (basketball) and USC Trojans (football). With apologies to USC’s DTLA campus, UCLA is the prettier of the two campuses—although Brentwood is prettier than just about anywhere else in the U.S. Westwood’s main street is Westwood Avenue, which runs north from Wilshire (if you are looking for good Iranian/Persian food head south on Westwood). The Regency Village Theater at Broxton and Reyburn is the site of numerous movie premieres because of its vintage Hollywood appearance. Diddy Reese is a world famous on UCLA’s campus ice cream shop. Broxton Brewery is a great recent addition to the neighborhood—it’s in a converted bank. As for Pauley Pavilion, the building doesn’t quite live up to the Bruin’s heritage and I would not place it in the same echelon as Cameron Indoor and other hallowed basketball grounds. I still need to see a USC football game at the LA Coliseum.
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