Los Angeles is home to more museums than any other city in the United States. These are a few of its best:
- Los Angeles Museums: Tops for Art: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The piece de resistance of Los Angeles art museums, this is the place where all the big traveling exhibitions come. The permanent collections here are no less prestigious, with something for almost every taste from avant garde to ancient.
- Los Angeles Museums: Tops for Architecture: Getty Museum
. They say this place has a good collection of art and antiquities, but architect Richard Meier's public spaces and architecture are so entrancing that I can't stay inside the galleries to confirm it. When they're open late, there's not a better place in town to watch the sunset.
- Los Angeles Museums: Tops for Cultures: Museum of Tolerance. Located in the center founded by the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, this place is not just about the Holocaust, but about racism and prejudice of all kinds.
- Los Angeles Museums: Tops for History: Hollywood Heritage Museum. It's not the biggest or the most gee-whiz, but this little place, the first building rented by Cecile B. deMille and Emile Lasky to house the film company that would eventually become Paramount Studios, wins my vote because it's the place where everything else got started.
- Los Angeles Museums: Tops for Natural History: Page Museum (La Brea Tarpits). Forget those boring dinosaurs, this place has sabre-toothed cats, woolly mammoths, giant sloths and a host of other creatures who've gotten stuck in the surrounding tar over the milennia.
- Los Angeles Museums: Tops for Science: California Science Center. If you ask me (or my husband the engineer), the California Science Center is one of the West's best science museums. It's roomy, offers a wide variety of exhibits on timely topics and provides some interesting insights into things scientific.
- Los Angeles Museums: Most Unusual: By all accounts, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Venice Beach is by far the most unusual Los Angeles Museum of all.
