In a city with no definable centre it can be hard to know where to head. Tom Otley sets off to explore pockets of culture in Los Angeles’ vibrant neighbourhoods. Los Angeles tends to evoke strong reactions in visitors. It’s a "love it or hate it" kind of place, but among those who express dislike, the main reason seems to be to do with geography. It has no centre – and there the objections begin. You can’t get a handle on it, everything is a long way apart, and with a public transportation system that, at least to the visitor, is unfathomable, you can easily spend a lot of time in the car trying to get from one end of it to another, caught in interminable queues on the freeways. There’s a lot of truth in it. Go there on business and try and make the most of a spare day for sightseeing, and you do need to decide on an area to explore. You can’t "do" LA in a day. As is frequently remarked, LA grew up at the same time as the automobile and, encouraged by the car manufacturers, it grubbed up its tram system in the 1940s to make more room for roads. It’s not the only city, or country, to make this mistake but it made the error on a grand scale. And for all the green credentials of Governor Schwarzenegger, it’s unlikely to start digging up the roads and building tram lines in the near future. So, given that LA isn’t going to change for your convenience, how can you enjoy some time off in the city? One way is to decide what makes this city special and concentrate on that. Here are a few suggestions… Entertainment To start with the most obvious point, Los Angeles is unrivalled as the centre of the entertainment industry. There are pretenders to the throne, but if you have anything more than a passing interest in, or knowledge of, films and television, you can fill several days on tours of recognisable locations, houses of the stars, death places of the famous and the Hollywood sign itself, not forgetting the movie studios, of course. One of the best options is the Warner Brothers VIP tour (two hours and 15 minutes), which can be booked online and costs US$45. (Alternatively, the Deluxe five-hour tour costs US$150.) It starts with a brief introductory video, and then you are taken by your guide to an electric cart and driven onto the lot. The facts, figures and sheer encyclopaedic knowledge of these guides is impressive, as they rattle off the thousands of movies and series filmed on these famous acres. It’s also fascinating to learn how adaptable the backdrops are. Everything from Minority Report (Tom Cruise) and The Dukes of Hazzard to the Harry Potter films have used these "fake" streets, which, although created decades ago, have appeared in hundreds of films disguised behind a new "dressing". The "dressers" even change the leaves on the (real) trees depending on whether the street is supposed to be in, say, Washington or New York. In another area you can see the entrance for the hospital in television drama ER, along with a couple of ambulances with fake dirt sprayed down the side and a recreation of Chicago’s L-train. For business travellers who spend half their lives wandering around cities in a dreamlike state (in town for only a few days, cramming in sight-seeing between meetings), it’s a familiarly disorientating experience – lifelike, yet not. Rap your knuckles on an old brick wall in a courtyard, and you’ll hear it ring hollow, yet your eyes continue to believe. There are other tours available in Los Angeles, including ones of the Paramount lot and Universal Studios. The latter has been converted into a funfair and would suit if you have younger children travelling with you (or immature work colleagues). There are other entertainment options – both of the sporting and musical kind – in the new LA LIVE cultural quarter close to downtown LA. Incorporating the Staples Centre, which seats 20,000, this is where the LA Lakers basketball team play, as well as the Los Angeles Kings ice hockey team on an ice rink beneath the basketball court. Home to large arena-sized rock concerts, the Staples Centre has now been joined by the first of several new developments, the 7,100-seat Nokia Theatre and purpose-built auditorium. If you have enough notice, and there’s a band or game playing, it’s worth trying to book for one of these venues. Both are modern, well designed and put the spectator’s comfort first. There are lots of food and beverage outlets, toilets and large comfortable seats – none of which is further than 67 metres from the stage, although with the five by nine-metre LED screens on either side of the auditorium, you already feel close enough to kiss the performers. The area originally held only the Los Angeles Convention Centre and, in the hope of invigorating that white elephant, a 54-storey, 1,001-room convention headquarters property combining a JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotel is being built, along with 224 luxury apartments, which cost US$1-4 million each. In addition, there will be a 2,300-capacity nightclub (the Conga Room), a 14-screen cinema and broadcast facilities for sports channel ESPN. (Visit nokiatheatrelalive.com.) Food Many US cities have an outstanding range of cuisine – the legacy of widespread immigration – but few can match the star-spotting possibilities LA’s restaurants offer. If people-watching seems a little shallow, try and suspend judgement, since you’ll find Angelinos are just as keen on it and you’ll enjoy comparing notes as to who you’ve seen that day. If you’re a pure foodie, spend a lunchtime or early evening at the Los Angeles Farmers Market (you’ll probably spot a star or two there anyway). In a city where walking is practised only by misguided tourists, exercise obsessives and those who’ve forgotten where they parked their cars, the market (open until 9pm Monday to Friday, 8pm Saturday and 7pm Sunday) offers the chance to browse dozens of food stalls, free from the worries of being run down or arrested. It’s been around since 1934, which is practically pre-history for the city, and the choice of cuisine is huge, as the names suggest: The Gumbo Pot, China Depot, La Korea, Phil’s Deli and Grill, and Tusquellas Fish and Oyster Bar, to name a few. It’s all freshly made (or caught) and there are informal tables spread out beneath the open-sided roof. Have your lunch here and you can buy a starter from one stall, a main course from another and a delicious pastry dessert from a third, while drinking a beer and watching evening English Premiership football beamed live from the UK (about the only thing the time difference is good for). There’s also conventional shopping in the adjacent outdoor mall – The Grove – with stores such as Borders, Kiehl’s, Nike and Abercrombie and Fitch. Architecture Although it is largely unplanned and sprawling, Los Angeles has plenty to keep architecture fans happy, from the modern masterpieces such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall designed by Frank Gehry (his home can also be viewed, at least from the outside, at 22nd and Washington), to those much earlier homes built by Frank Lloyd Wright (Millard House, Storer House) and the Schindler House of 1922. You can tour this international-syle masterpiece (pictured below), and hear the entertaining story of how Viennese architect Schindler (1887-1953) thought California never got cold, and designed his new house for his family (as well as friend and colleague Richard Chace and his wife) with outdoor living in mind. In fact, it does get cold, so the Chaces moved to Florida and architect Richard Neutra and wife moved in with the Schindlers. With adaptation, perseverance and the recognition that summer always follows winter, it was their residence for over 30 years. Now recognised as one of the most important residential houses ever designed, it spawned a whole style of LA architecture and living, and is definitely worth an hour of your time, particularly since it is in West Hollywood and so easy to reach. (Visit makcenter.org for more details.) Art Los Angeles has an astonishing range of art galleries and museums, several of which are world class. First up is the Museum of Contemporary Art, with three locations (MOCA Grand Avenue, Pacific Design Centre and the Geffen Contemporary), each with a different slant to its collection, and each worth visiting. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has a new exhibition space – the Broad (rhymes with road) Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) – in a Renzo Piano-designed building. You access it via a long, open-air escalator, then shuttle between floors using a giant glass lift. The art is modern (mostly from the Broad collection rather than LACMA’s), and includes works by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Chuck Close. For a more traditional museum experience, across the new courtyard (enhanced by the new installation of street lights) you’ll find highlights from the 150,000 works in LACMA’s permanent collection, including everything from German Expressionism and Islamic art, to European sculpture and art of the Ancient Near East. Temporary exhibitions are also worth searching out; The Age of Imagination: Japanese Art, 1615–1868, is on show from June 22 to September 14, 2008. Last, but definitely not least, there’s the high and mighty Getty, a fabulous treasure trove of a museum set in the hills overlooking Los Angeles and housed in a blindingly white Richard Meier building, with hillside gardens designed by Robert Irwin. You need the best part of a day for this one, although it’s very well laid out, from the car parking beneath to the organisation of the collection. Since its opening in 1997, over 15 million visitors have toured the collection, which boasts everything from paintings, drawings, manuscripts, sculpture and decorative arts, to European and American photography. Highlights include Van Gogh’s painting Irises and works by Monet and Cézanne. There are frequent temporary exhibitions, such as Imagining Christ (until July 27), a display of manuscripts from the Getty’s permanent collection showing the different ways Christ has been understood by the medieval and Renaissance faithful between the years 1000 and 1500. Los Angeles may be an acquired taste, particularly for the British with their love of America’s Eastern Seaboard, but for those with an open mind and a taste for reinvention, if only for a few days, there’s a freedom to the city that needn’t be cramped by traffic jams and a lack of pavements.

Los Angeles International Airport

Los Angeles has much to recommend it as both a leisure and business destination, but the security queues at Los Angeles airport (LAX) are one of the city’s low points. Arriving at certain times of day, the queues can be so long that passengers are kept on planes before disembarking (around 100 times in the last 12 months). As reported in last month’s Business Traveller, arriving on the inaugural Air France London Heathrow-Los Angeles flight, the wait from the end of the queue to the front was 47 minutes, not helped by airport staff forbidding the use of phones or Blackberries so that passengers could notify those waiting landside of their predicament. It’s a problem that LAX is acutely aware of, but asks for understanding. The Tom Bradley International Terminal (TBIT), which handles international flights, opened in 1984 in time for the Olympics and has not been substantially renovated since that date. It handles ten million passengers each year, out of a total of around 61 million for the airport as a whole (2006), and has over 30 airlines using it. Things are gradually improving with a renovation taking place in the customs arrival hall at TBIT, but what’s unlikely to change in the near or even medium future, is the ability of LAX to act as a hub for international flights arriving and then wanting to travel elsewhere in the US. The location of the terminals, coupled with the requirement for international passengers to collect their luggage and then re-check it onto the domestic flight, means that connection times would be prohibitive (at least three hours to be safe). There are currently ten daily flights between LA and London with British Airways, Air France, Virgin Atlantic, United Airlines, Air New Zealand and American Airlines.

Contacts

Discover Los Angeles discoverlosangeles.com Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), 5905 Wilshire Blvd broadartfoundation.org The Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax, 6333 West 3rd Street; tel +1 323 933 9211 farmersmarketla.com Warner Bros VIP Tour, 3400 Riverside Drive, Burbank; tel +1 818 972 8687 wbstudiotour.com The Grove, 189 The Grove Drive; +1 888 315 8883, +1 323 900 8080 (Mon-Thurs 10am-9pm, Fri-Sat 10am-10pm, Sun 11am-8pm) thegrovela.com Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 South Grand Avenue; +1 323 850 2000 disneyconcerthall.com Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 South Grand Avenue; +1 213 621 1741 (Mon and Fri 11am-5pm, Thurs 11am-8pm, Sat and Sun 11am-6pm, closed Tues and Wed) moca.org Getty Centre, 1200 Getty Centre Drive; +1 310 440 7300 (Tues, Thurs, Sun 10am-6pm, Fri and Sat 10am-9pm, closed Mon) getty.edu Beverly Centre, 8500 Beverly Boulevard; +1 310 854 0071 – (Mon-Fri 10am-9pm, Sat 10am-8pm, Sun 11am-6pm) beverlycenter.com Click here for a review of Sofitel Beverly Hills