Los Angeles for families

Best museums

Los Angeles museums cover an enormous range of subject and ambition. The city carries two heavyweight art museums — the Museum of Contemporary Art at 250 S Grand Ave and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard — alongside The Broad, a contemporary art museum in Downtown Los Angeles. There is a campus-scale Getty Center at Getty Center Drive 1200, a Grammy Museum at 800 W Olympic Blvd, and the La Brea Tar Pits preserved as a protected area. Small ethnic-history institutions anchor specific communities — the Japanese American National Museum, the Chinese American Museum, and the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles. The natural-history side runs through the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; the historic-house tradition lives at Heritage Square Museum at 3800 di Homer Street. The Petersen Automotive Museum at 6060 Wilshire Boulevard anchors the Wilshire museum corridor. The twelve below are listed in rank order; the prose tells you which to skip if you are tired, which rewards a return visit, and which is worth the planning. Locals tend to specialise — knowing one museum well rather than skimming ten — and that is the framing to bring.