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Curated guides created by experts and tastemakers
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Gary Baseman
Gary Baseman's Los Angeles
I'm Gary Baseman, an LA-born visual artist/illustrator in love with this amazing city—its humor, heartbreak, strip malls, museums, and quiet corners. LA isn't a backdrop for me; it's a collaborator. Every character, sketch, and story I make is a conversation with this place. I'm excited for you to visit and hopefully appreciate a few of the very special places here that have shaped me and my work.
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Overlook Staff Picks
LA's Important Residential Architecture (1 of 2)
This collection tells the story of how Los Angeles invented modern residential architecture. It begins in 1908 with Greene & Greene perfecting the handmade house, then Wright blowing it apart with industrial concrete, Neutra importing European rationalism and building an entire colony around it, and Schindler threading something wilder and more Californian through it all. This is the intellectual spine of LA modernism — the route where ideas were tested on tiny lots and steep hillsides before they changed the world. You could do this route comfortably in a half-day, or a full day if you tour Gamble House, Hollyhock, and VDL (all open as museums).
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Overlook Staff Picks
Galleries That Put LA on the Art World Map
These ten galleries represent roughly $4 billion in annual art market activity, and every one of them is free and open to the public. No tickets, no timed entry, no membership. You walk in off the street and stand in front of the same works that collectors are paying seven figures for. Together they cover photography, sculpture, painting, installation, and conceptual art across every major movement from Abstract Expressionism to whatever's happening right now. Five years ago half of them didn't have LA locations. Their arrival is the clearest possible signal that Los Angeles has become the most important art city in America outside New York — and some would drop the qualifier.
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Overlook Staff Picks
Important Public Parks of LA
Los Angeles is the only major American city where you can stand on a mountain, look at the ocean, and see a skyline — all from a public park you didn't pay to enter. These ten parks span 160,000 acres from sea-level bluffs to 1,600-foot ridgelines, and together they represent the single strongest argument against the idea that LA is just concrete and cars. Every one of them is free. Several are genuinely world-class. Most Angelenos haven't visited half of them, which is both the problem and the opportunity.
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Overlook Staff Picks
Important Commercial and Public Architecture of LA
What makes this collection of 20 places exceptional is that it represents every major movement in American architecture from the 1890s to the present — Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, International Style, Googie, Brutalism, Postmodernism, Deconstructivism, and contemporary parametric design — all within a single metropolitan area. No other American city offers that continuity. These buildings are not just landmarks. They are primary sources. Seeing them in person is not tourism, it's fieldwork for anyone who appreciates design on a grand scale.
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Overlook Staff Picks
Epic Drives of LA
No city on Earth matches the driving roads within two hours of Los Angeles. Angeles Crest climbs from suburban Pasadena to 7,000 feet through high-speed alpine switchbacks. The Rim of the World Byway traces the San Bernardino ridgeline with the entire Inland Empire spread below. The Palms to Pines Scenic Byway rises from the Coachella Valley desert floor through chaparral into pine forest — five climate zones in a single drive. Route 74 drops from the Santa Rosa Mountains through a sequence of blind corners that rivals any European pass road. The Arroyo Seco Parkway — America's first freeway, opened in 1940 — still carries you from downtown to Pasadena along a route so beautiful that Caltrans designated it a historic parkway rather than widen it. Even the Riverside Freeway's Santa Ana Canyon stretch reminds you that Southern California engineered its freeways through landscapes most countries would have declared national parks.
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