Beyond the glitz and glamour of Beverly Hills and the towering studio sound stages of Burbank, L.A. is home to some truly unusual treasures. If you know where to look, you can spend the last of the sunny weather days hiking to an abandoned missile tower or wandering through a convenience store for time travelers. Here are 10 hidden gems in L.A. to add to your must-visit list.
Angelino Heights is Los Angeles’s second-oldest district outside Downtown, founded in 1886 and celebrated for having the city’s highest concentration of 19th-century Victorian architecture. Often called L.A.’s first suburb, the hilltop residential area sits just two miles northwest of downtown. The historic homes have starred as backdrops for prominent productions, including Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video, the television series “Charmed”, and “The Fast and the Furious.”
Founded in 1963, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater is one of the country’s oldest children’s puppet theaters still operating today. Every performance features handcrafted puppets with colorful sets and live storytelling. The theater’s puppet collection boasts over 3,000 characters dating back to Baker’s original puppets from the 1940s.
This house turned park and museum is famous as the is famous as Frank Lloyd Wright’s first Los Angeles commission, a milestone in California Modernism architecture and the only UNESCO World Heritage site in Los Angeles. The 17-room home blends Mesoamerican and Native American styles, featuring tilted exterior walls, concrete relief friezes, a central courtyard and expansive rooftop terraces designed to merge interior and exterior spaces. The home was commissioned by oil heiress and arts patron Aline Barnsdall, who named the house after her favorite flower, the hollyhock.
Nestled between the glass-clad skyscrapers of downtown sits this architectural gem, the L.A. Central Library. The original Goodhue building was built in 1926 with influences of ancient Egyptian and Mediterranean Revival architecture. The central tower is topped with a tiled mosaic pyramid with suns on the sides, with a hand holding a torch representing the “Light of Learning” at the apex.
This is not your typical dusty old museum. Founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson in 1988, the museum’s collection includes a mixture of artistic, scientific, ethnographic and historic items, as well as some unclassifiable exhibits. In other words, it’s a permanent installation dedicated to obscure art and pseudoscience that will leave guests questioning what a museum is and could be.
Sitting atop Mulholland Drive is an abandoned Project Nike missile base, one of the only such sites still open and maintained as a public park. The U.S. Army used the site from 1956 to 1968 as a last line of defense from Soviet planes that were allegedly coming to drop an atomic bomb over Los Angeles. The journey to the site can be completed as a two-hour roundtrip hike with beautiful views or a short drive from the valley side.
This multi-business storefront is a fusion of creativity. Beginning as a small family-run shop in 1971, Soap Plant combined mom’s homemade soaps, dad’s graphic designs, and son’s Billy and Peter’s original leatherware and ceramics. By the early 1980s, Soap Plant was Billy’s alone, and he moved the shop to Melrose Avenue, where he added books, ceramics and unique jewelry to his ever-increasing stock. In 1984, Billy bought the adjacent storefront and opened Wacko as a pop culture toy shop. Even today, the combined stores continue to offer an eclectic range of novelties, gifts, housewares and other pop culture treasures.
This wacky shop is a self-proclaimed convenience store for time travelers selling an assortment of oddities and the headquarters of Barnacle & Barnacle Publishers, a publishing house that specializes in original student-authored books. In all seriousness, Time Travel Mart is the storefront for the non-profit organization 826LA. 826LA is dedicated to supporting Los Angeles students with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. All proceeds from the store help to keep all programs free for their students.
L.A. has some truly gorgeous hiking trails if you know where to look, but nothing quite as unique as the Topanga Lookout. This two-mile hike nestled in the Topanga Canyon takes around two hours to complete, ending at a stunning graffitied platform that used to be the site of an old fire lookout tower. Take a springtime trip to experience the wildflower season or check out the stunning panoramic views all year round.
In the South Central neighborhood of Watts stands a rather peculiar work of art. Seventeen interconnected sculptural towers rise high and are adorned with shells, tiles, soda bottles, mirrors, shards of pottery and two grinding wheels. The entire work was built by one man, Italian immigrant Sabato Rodia, over a period of 34 years.
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