Los Angeles hides its age well. Under the freeways sit an 1818 adobe, a 1771 mission, Ice Age asphalt seeps and a Victorian street rebuilt board by board. Three days tracing the city from fossil ground to Olympic stadium.
Asphalt seeps still bubble here, where mammoths, dire wolves and sabertooth cats sank 50,000 years ago; over 3.5 million fossils have come out of Pit 91 and Project 23. Museum opens 9:30am, last entry 4pm.
Founded 1771, a decade before the pueblo itself, the fourth of California's 21 missions and the reason Spanish Los Angeles exists. The 1805 stone church with capped Moorish buttresses reopened in 2023 after an arson fire.
Built 1818 by cattle rancher Francisco Ávila, this is the oldest standing house in the city, furnished as it stood in the 1840s with adobe walls nearly a metre thick. It anchors 27 historic buildings around the original plaza.
Dedicated 1822 and the oldest continuously used church in Los Angeles, raised by Franciscans and pueblo settlers facing the plaza. Its sanctuary sheltered Central American refugees through the 1980s sanctuary movement.
The last great American rail terminal, opened May 1939 on ground cleared by razing the original Chinatown. Mission Revival outside, Streamline Moderne within: 15-metre ceilings, travertine walls, inlaid marble floors.
An 1893 office block designed by draftsman George Wyman, who reportedly accepted the job after a planchette message from his dead brother. Wrought iron, Belgian marble stairs and open cage lifts sit under a glass atrium.
Opened 1923, the only stadium to host two Olympic Games (1932 and 1984) with a third coming in 2028, plus JFK's 1960 nomination speech. Tours take in the peristyle, Olympic cauldron, press box and locker rooms.
The self-styled shortest railway in the world: two counterweighted cars, Sinai and Olivet, hauling passengers up Bunker Hill since 1901. It was dismantled, moved half a block in 1996, and closed twice after accidents.
Eight Victorian structures rescued from the wrecking ball and rebuilt on this Arroyo Seco plot, among them the 1887 Hale House and an 1897 Methodist church. Interiors are seen by docent-led tour only, Friday to Sunday.
One of three surviving Japantowns in the United States; the First Street North block is a National Historic Landmark. The monument lists over 16,000 Nisei soldiers who served while their families were held in camps.
An Italian immigrant tile setter spent 1921 to 1954 raising 17 steel spires up to 30 metres, bound with mortar and studded with bottle glass, tile and shells — alone, without scaffolding. The city's 1959 demolition test failed.
Musicians have gathered on this corner since the 1930s, waiting in full traje for wedding and party hire; the stone kiosk was a 1998 gift from Jalisco. The area was LA's Jewish and Japanese quarter before the freeways cut it apart.